EMOttawa Podcast! Tick Borne Illness Part 2: Anaplasmosis
EMOttawa Podcast Episode 6Tick Borne Illness Part 2 - Anaplasmosis (Click here to access Podcast Main menu) Click here for Part 1, focusing on Lyme disease. In part 2 of our 2-part series on tick-borne diseases, Dr. Rajiv Thavanathan interviews Dr. Mikkey McGuinty, an...
EMOttawa Podcast! Tick Borne Illness Part 1: Lyme Disease
EMOttawa Podcast Episode 5 Tick Borne Illness Part I - Lyme Disease (Click here to access Podcast Main menu) In part 1 of our 2-part series on Tick-borne diseases, Dr. Rajiv Thavanathan interviews Dr. Mikki McGuinty, an infectious disease clinician-scientist. This...
Mastering the myocardium: Cardiogenic Shock
Cardiogenic shock (CS) is considered the most severe form of acute heart failure. It is an important and often under-recognized clinical entity in the emergency department (ED). The difficulty in diagnosis lies in its diverse presentations, overlap with other shock...
Advancing Resuscitation Care: Controversial Guidelines
There are 35,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) annually in Canada6. Patient survival in OHCA increases dramatically with resuscitation; bystander CPR, use of AEDs and activation of EMS. Signifiant gains have been made with education at both the community and...
How to Tell a Story: Impactful Medical Talks
Stories are captivating and they’re the best way to convey … well anything really. Through this blogpost, we’ll see that the current formats of delivering talks, medical talks especially, are at best a tad outdated and at worst borderline ineffective, and I hope that...
Point of Care Ultrasound Archiving Requirements
Canadian national guidelines recommend Point of Care Ultrasound (PoCUS) image archiving for documentation, and to facilitate quality improvement and assurance - key components of driving great patient-centred care with ultrasound. The CAEP Emergency Ultrasound...
Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine
Methodology: 4/5 Usefulness: 4.5/5 Polack FP, et al. N Engl J Med. 2020 Dec 31;383(27):2603-2615. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2034577. Epub 2020 Dec 10. Editorial: SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination - An Ounce (Actually, Much Less) of Prevention. Question/methods: Multinational,...
Navigating ED Patient Complaints
Patient complaints are common in medicine. Emergency medicine (EM) in particular has some of the highest numbers of complaints, just behind obstetrics and surgery. Almost all of you reading this have probably been subject to some sort of complaint, and if it hasn't...
Delayed Antibiotic Prescription for Children With Respiratory Infections: A Randomized Trial
Methodology: 3/5 Usefulness: 1/5 Mas-Dalmau G, et al. Pediatrics. 2021 Mar;147(3):e20201323. doi: 10.1542/peds.2020-1323. Question and Methods: This RCT assessed effectiveness and safety of delayed (DAP), immediate (IAP) and no antibiotic prescription (NAP) in...
Back to Black: A Review of Activated Charcoal
In this blog post, Dr. Alexandra Hamelin weighs in on many of the controversies surrounding activated charcoal (AC), and provides a practical approach for its use in overdose patients in the emergency department. Specifically: The dosing of AC The time window...