EMCrit Podcast - Emergency Critical Care

Electrocardiograms can be subtle; but you can't miss them or patients die. Today, I interview, Dr. Stephen Smith of the incredible blog: Dr. Smith's EKG Blog.

I was lucky to cajole Cliff Reid of the amazing blog, resus.me on to the EMCrit program. Cliff is truly a doc after my own heart as you will hear from the cast.

Delayed Sequence Intubation (DSI) is a procedural sedation, the procedure in this case being effective preoxygenation. Give ketamine, put them on the mask, and in 3 minutes paralyze and intubate.

Hmm… he’s tasty, but he just needs a little salt! In this podcast, I discuss the management of hyponatremia in the ED.

My favorite ED things for 2010...the EMCrit dirty dozen.

When an ED starts providing advanced care for severe sepsis, lactate testing is an absolute requirement. Lactate use brings up a lot of questions, especially if it is not commonly ordered in your department. In this podcast, I discuss all of the lactate questions that have come up in the course of the NYC Sepsis Collaborative.

Management of traumatic arrest. Many things to do in these patients, but two things you definitely should not be doing are closed-chest CPR or giving ACLS medications. We discuss who gets a thoracotomy, what to do if a thoracotomy is not indicated, and when to stop.

In this podcast, I discuss extubating patients in the ED. Specifically, I deal with patients who have only been intubated for a few hours in distinction to extubation of the patient who has been lingering in your ED for 2-3 days. The best patients for this short-term extubation are those intox folks with a low GCS and signs of trauma, overdoses, or endoscopy cases.

The brand new ACLS & BCLS guidelines were published last week. Not huge changes, but some good stuff! The free full text is available at the Circulation website. It takes hours to make your way through all of it. I boiled it down to just the facts and posted a summary on the EMCrit site. In this EMCrit Podcast I discuss some of the highlights that I think are particularly important.

This is the video for cerebellar stroke diagnosis. Listen to the podcast first.

What if I told you that I think that patient you just sent home with vertigo may have been a missed cerebellar stroke? Would you be dialing risk management or could you tell me all of the reasons why I'm wrong? Isolated vertigo without other neurological findings can't be a stroke, right? That is true, if you are doing the right exam, but if you are just doing your standard ED neuro screening exam then you might be missing serious pathology. In this episode of the EMCrit podcast, I discuss how to perform the tests that will differentiate a peripheral cause of continuous vertigo from a cerebellar stroke.

Hey folks. As I get ready for ACEP, I just wanted to get a quick podcast put up. One of the listeners requested an episode on the treatment of hyperkalemia in the ED.

This week we talk about managing the intra-arrest period of cardiac arrest. My paradigm has changed dramatically over the past few years. In the past, I viewed the arrest as a period to teach my residents how to place a subclavian central line, how to intubate when the patient is moving, and how to cram as many drugs as possible into a patient in a short period of time. Looking at how I manage an arrest today, so much has changed.

I'm lecturing at ACEP in Las Vegas this year. This is one of two lectures I'm giving there. If you are going to the conference and plan on coming to my lecture, don't listen to this lecture; I'd rather you here the real one in person.

This week we discuss the resuscitation of the hemorrhagic shock patient with Dr. Richard Dutton, MD.