clinical cases

Emergency physicians commonly care for poisoned patients. These exposures may be either intentional or unintentional. Salicylates are commonly found in many topical and over the counter preparations, yet salicylate toxicity is often overlooked and underestimated as a potential cause for illness in our patients. Below is a condensed quick-guide of common mistakes that emergency physicians may be making with respect to salicylate overdoses and how to fix them. The goals of care to take away from this article are prevention of intestinal absorption and CNS entry of salicylates, as well as drug elimination.

We’ve all heard it at one point or another: “Man, I’d HATE to have to intubate THAT!” Typically, this sentence is used to describe a patient in an ominous, sphincter-tightening situation, or the patient with the obviously suboptimal airway.

You walk by the door to the Resuscitation Bay or Trauma Bay, see that the patient is in respiratory distress, and rapidly breeze through your airway mnemonics and ultimately come to the conclusion that this would be a scary airway. The airways of myths and legends, and where heroes are made.

The patient with shortness of breath and cough at altitude: How can EM physicians optimize care and outcomes?

Is the use of oral contrast for abdominal CT still necessary?

It’s a crazy night in the ED, and you are about four hours into your shift. You have just received a new patient with chief complaint of altered mental status coming in via EMS.

In the febrile HIV patient, there are many diagnostic dilemmas and potential life-threatening disease processes which make the diagnosis and treatment difficult. When approaching these patients, it is useful to separate complications into organ systems and then try to estimate the patient’s immune status if it is not known.

A review of how to resuscitate a pregnant patient in the midst of medical catastrophe and how to rapidly estimate gestational age