Episodes

David Carr discusses his top 10 pearls on endocarditis and blood culture interpretation in this Carr's Cases Best Case Ever on EM Cases - Endocarditis and Blood Culture Interpretation. [wpfilebase tag=file id=560 tpl=emc-play /] [wpfilebase tag=file id=561 tpl=emc-mp3 /]

In part 2 of our round-table discussion on EM Cases with sports medicine guru Dr. Ivy Cheng and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Hossein Mehdian we elucidate some key commonly missed uncommon orthopedic injuries that if mismanaged, carry significant long term morbidity. Injuries of the tendons and ligaments are often overlooked by emergency providers as relatively benign injuries and generally are not well understood. Syndesmosis Injuries typically occur in impact sports. They are missed in about 20% of c...

On this EM Cases Best Case Ever, Andrew Sloas, the brains behinds the fabulous PEM-ED podcast tells the tale of a pericardiocentesis gone bad and what he learned from it. Emergency pericardicentesis can be life saving, but it also carries risks. Dr. Sloas reviews the steps to take to ensure that the pericardiocentesis needle is the the correct place to minimize the risk of intubating the right ventricle of the heart. A discussion of errors of omission and ones of commission follows.... [wpfileba...

In this bonus EM Cases podcast, The Stiell Sessions 2, we have Dr. Ian Stiell discussing an update in Atrial Fibrillation 2014 management including the age-old question of rate control vs rhythm control, the new CHADS-65 algorithm for oral anticogulant therapy, the need to initiate anticoagulant therapy in the ED, the more aggressive use of the Ottawa Aggressive Protocol, the dangers of attempting to cardiovert unstable patients who are in permanent Atrial Fibrillation, the new 150 rule to help ...

There are hundreds of clinical decision rules and risk scales published in the medical literature, some more widely adopted than others. Ian Stiell, the father of clinical decision rules, shares with us his views and experiences gained from co-creating some of the most influential CDRs and risk scales to date. He explains the criteria for developing a CDR, the steps to developing a valid CDR, how best to apply CDRs and risk scales to clinical practice, and the hot-off the-press new Ottawa COPD R...

In this second part of the Weingart-Himmel Sessions on critical care pearls for the community ED on the EM Cases podcast, we discuss the many controversies and recent changes in fluid management in severe sepsis and septic shock. With the recently published ARISE trial, and some deviations from Early Goal Directed Therapy, we are changing the way we think about fluids in sepsis: the type of fluid, the volume of fluid, the rate of fluid administration, the timing of introducing vasopressors and t...

It makes sense that the treatment of primary spnontaneous pneumothorax would lend itself well to outpatient management, since patients are usually young and otherwise healthy, and the mortality and morbidity from these air leaks are really very low. Most patients would rather be managed as an outpatient rather than admitted to hospital and sending these patients home would probably end up saving the system resources and money. In this month's Journal Jam Podcast on small bore chest tube and outp...

Hot on the heels of Dr. Weingart's latest publication in the Annal of EM on Preoxygenation & Delayed Sequence Intubation, we have Dr. Weingart, perhaps the world's most influential critical care educator, and Dr. Walter Himmel, 'The Walking Encyclopedia of EM' discussing how the community ED doc can use preoxygenation, apneic oxygenation and delayed sequence intubation to help improve airway management knowledge and skills. Whether you work in a rural setting or a big urban community hospital, D...

In this Episode, a follow up to Episode 18 Point of Care Ultrasound Pearls and Pitfalls, which covered pericardial effusion, pneumothorax, undifferentiated shock, cardiac arrest & DVT, we bring you 4 of North America’s Pediatric Point of Care Ultrasound gurus recorded live from Toronto during the first ever P2 Conference (PEM POCUS) - Pediatric Emergency Medicine Point of Care Ultrasound. The format will be a bit different for this episode. I’ve asked each our P2 gurus to describe a case that il...

In this special 15 minute EM Cases podcast on Ebola preparedness we bring you an interview with Professor Howard Ovens, the director of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. As an EM physician who took care of many SARS patients and the chief of the ED during the SARS outbreak, Dr. Ovens has a very rational approach to how to prepare our emergency departments for patients who present with fever who have been traveling in an Ebola outbreak region, including triaging and personal ...

We rarely discuss medico-legal issues on EM Cases because it misguides us a bit from good patient centered care – which is what emergency medicine is really all about. Nonetheless, missed orthopedic injuries are the most common reason for an emergency doc to be sued in Canada. This is partly because missed orthopedic injuries are far more common than missed MIs for example, but it’s also because it’s easy to miss certain orthopedic injuries – especially the ones that aren’t super common. And ort...

If you believe that coping with some of the people we deal with in emergency medicine is difficult or impossible, you’re not alone. We all feel this way from time to time. Managing difficult patients can be a challenge to the health care provider and to the entire ED. The hostile aggressive patient, the demanding patient, the know-it-all, the excessively anxious patient, and the incessant complainer, are some of the folks that we need to know how to manage effectively. If we fail to handle these...

Dr. David Carr presents his third of EM Cases' Carr's Cases. This series features potentially debilitating diagnoses that may be thought of as 'zebras', but actually have a higher incidence then we might think - and if diagnosed early, can significantly effect patient outcomes. Dr. Carr tells the story of young woman with an MRSA supra pateller abscess who was put on trimethoprim sulfamethoxazole and presents looking very ill with a severe headache. Not only has trimethoprim sulfamethoxazole bee...

In this first ever episode of the Journal Jam podcast, a collaboration between EM Cases, Academic Life in EM and The Annals of Emergency Medicine's Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club, Teresa Chan and I, along with Jeff Kline, Jonathan Kirschner, Anand Swaminathan, Salim Rezaie and Sam Shaikh from ALiEM, discuss the potential for Age Adjusted D-dimer to rule out pulmonary embolism in low risk patients over the age of 50. We discuss 4 key questions about the ADJUST-PE Study from JAMA in March ...

Kids aren't little adults. Pediatric sepsis and septic shock usually presents as 'cold shock' where as adult septic shock usually presents as 'warm shock', for example. In this episode, a continuation of our discussion on Fever from with Ottawa PEM experts, Sarah Reid and Gina Neto, we discuss the pearls and pitfalls in the recognition and management of pediatric sepsis and septic shock. We review the subtle clinical findings that will help you pick up septic shock before it's too late as well a...

If you believe that coping with some of the people we deal with in emergency medicine is difficult or impossible, you’re not alone. We all feel this way from time to time. We all work in stressful environments where it may feel as though we have too little time for effective patient communication, patient centered care and patient satisfaction. You and your patients may often have mismatched views of what’s important. You may have a specific medical agenda and they might have a very different ag...

Dr. David Carr presents his second of Carr's Cases. This series features some potentially life-threatening diagnoses that may be perceived as zebras, but actually have a higher incidence then we might think - and if diagnosed early, can significantly effect patient outcomes. This Best Case Ever is about Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis, a diagnosis that was only discovered in 2005, and has only recently been recognized by the Emergency Medicine community. Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis may mimic...

Have you ever seen a child in your emergency department with a fever - he asks sarcastically? At the ginormous community hospital where I work, we see about 25,000 kids each year in our ED and about half of them present with fever. Yes, there still exists fever phobia in our society, which brings hoards of worried parents into the ED with their febrile kids. For most of these kids it's relatively straight forward: Most kids with fever have clinical evidence of an identifiable source of infection...

Ottawa this year, I had the pleasure of discussing pediatric shock and sepsis with Dr. Sarah Reid, a good medical school friend of mine from the Gretzky Year ('99) graduating class. I knew back then that she was heading for PEM educator stardom. Lo and behold, she is the now the director of CME at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and a national PEM speaker extraordinaire. After recording an eye-opening session on Pediatric Fever Without a Source and Pediatric Sepsis, she told me the st...

Dr. Walter Himmel (the 'walking encyclopedia of EM') gave a fantastic talk from North York General's Emergency Medicine Update Conference in Toronto, which have edited into a podcast with key commentary and summaries. Dr. Himmel eloquently shows us, through absolutely stunning personal cases, how evidence based medicine can be appropriately or inappropriately applied in real practice, resulting in major outcome differences for your patients. He elucidates the importance of clinical experience, p...

I met up with Mike Betzner at North York General's Update in EM Conference in Toronto. He is the medical director of Air Transport STARS air ambulance out of Calgary and an amazing speaker on the national lecturing circuit. His Best Case Ever on Chloral Hydrate poisoning & cardiac arrest describes a young man in cardiac arrest with resistant Ventricular Fibrillation and Torsades de Pointes. There is only one class of drugs that can get him back into normal sinus rhythm. Dr. Betzner describes how...

In early June of this year I caught up with Dr. Rob Rogers of iTeach EM and The Teaching Course, Dr. Ken Milne of The Skeptics Guide to EM and Dr. Brent Thoma of Academic Life in EM and Boring EM at the Canadian Association of Emergency Medicine Conference in Ottawa to chat about the evolution of Social Media & Emergency Medicine Learning. In this podcast, we discuss how Social Media can enhance your career, tips on how to get the most out of FOAMed without getting overwhelmed by the volume of m...

This past May in Toronto, the largest and, in my opinion, best Canadian EM conference, North York General Hospital's Emergency Medicine Update Conference, attracted 'Captain Cortex' himself, Stuart Swadron, a Toronto native to talk about his approach to vertigo, which highlights how not to miss a posterior circulation stroke. For the seventh year running the EMU conference was proud to have one of the worlds most well known EM educators, Amal Mattu who presented the most important Cardiology Lit...

In anticipation of the Highlights from North York General's Emergency Medicine Update Conference 2014 we have the master educator himself, Dr. Amal Mattu's Best Case ever of a patient who presented with a COPD exacerbation, that we recorded at the conference in Toronto just a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Mattu gives you a string of pearls and pitfalls when it comes to management of COPD, bagging & vent settings that you will never forget. In the upcoming episode Dr. Mattu will review his favorite pa...