Saving Brainspace with POCUS
February 8th, 2018
Here is a cool case that Lloyd Gordon recently sent us… “A 60 year-old woman had a fever of 39.6C and vomiting. The triage note mentioned abdominal pain but she didn’t have any pain when I saw her and she never asked for analgesics. Her abdomen was completely benign and she looked well. Not much […]
How’s that for a title! Books, lectures and plenty of other resources on foreign bodies would not be complete without at least one eye-catching image of a foreign body in an orifice where it clearly does not belong :). And there is often a bizarre story to go along with it. Admit it! Everyone has […]
Is cancer an emergency medical diagnosis? Technically, it’s not. The primary diagnosis of cancer does not show up in any emergency medicine textbooks. And rightly so. Although the complications of cancer can kill quickly, cancer itself develops relatively slowly. As such, the responsibility for the initial diagnosis of cancer falls largely to family physicians and […]
Every ED across the planet has its own demographic. Some EDs may see more of this, and other EDs may see more of that. But I bet we all see lots of cases of abdominal pain. Often enough, it can be difficult and time-consuming to make the diagnosis, especially in the older patient. Order blood […]
What is the role of the acute-care clinician in strokes? In large part, it’s really unexciting. We all know that. All need a CT which is usually normal. Most get admitted. Whether they are devastating or trivial, there’s not much that we can do about it (if this makes you think about lytics, go to […]
I am working away on the French version of the eBook making a few edits as I go. One important addition is a video from Dr Bernard Richard. Bernard is an EDE 2 instructor based in Valleyfield, Québec. He saw a young women with a first trimester presentation, some combination of pain and bleeding. The […]
Nurses are really good at putting in Foley catheters. They do it all the time and most of them are really easy to place. Most of them… When they aren’t, who do they ask for help? You bet ya! The emergency physician. If you are like Dr Lloyd Gordon, the first thing that you do […]
EDE 3 is being held at Mont-Saint-Anne just east of Québec City later this week. So I thought I would post a case where a couple of EDE 3 scans were quite useful: Groin hernias presented by Dr Andrew Skinner and the TAP block presented by Dr Ben Ho. A 69 year-old man presented with […]
At EDE 2, we talk about using Ocular POCUS primarily in the search for retinal detachments and vitreous hemorrhages. It comes up less often, but we also point out its utility in the assessment of the trauma case, especially the ruptured globe. One of my colleagues in Sudbury, Dr Mark Dube, saw such a case […]
Have you ever used POCUS to diagnose a skull fracture? We talk about it briefly at EDE 2, although we focus on the distal radius, extremities, and some other bones a bit more. But POCUS is really useful for skull fractures. Of course, if you have ready access to a CT scan, its utility will […]
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