EMCrit Podcast - Emergency Critical Care

It seems the government and other specialties are trying hard to make sedation as difficult as possible in the ED. We must persevere to provide the best procedural sedation to allow maximal comfort and safety for our patients. This continues the discussion started in Part I.

Here is a piece I wrote for EMPGU

This is the audio only version of the previous post (Part I of the Sedation Talk).

It seems the government and other specialties are trying hard to make sedation as difficult as possible in the ED. We must persevere to provide the best procedural sedation to allow maximal comfort and safety for our patients. This brief lecture was originally posted on the defunct EMCrit Lecture Site on 8/7/2009.

Severe CNS Infections are time dependent diagnoses! You must have a high index of suspicion, a good plan for your work-up, and rapid provision of treatment. After seeing a severely ill meningitis patient, I figured I would do a podcast on some tips and pearls on this topic.

This week, I am joined by Leon Gussow, MD of the excellent blog: The Poison Review (TPR). TPR is my source for new toxicology articles; I highly recommend it as an incredible read. I got to meet Leon for a few beers a month ago; he is just a great guy. My Canadian pal, Ram, suggested calcium channel blocker OD as a podcast episode. Ram, here you go.

At this stage of the game, if your hospital is not offering hypothermia to out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, you are probably lagging behind optimal care. For shockable rhythms, you essentially double your patient's chances of leaving the hospital with good neurological outcome. However hypothermia can be tough, unless you have done a bunch. Learn from my mistakes in this lecture.

When I was a resident, every vent lecture either put me to sleep or left me dazed and bewildered. I gave a lecture of that ilk when I started working after fellowship--I had become part of the problem. I decided there must be a way to make vent management more understandable and if not interesting, at least bearable.

When I was a resident, every vent lecture either put me to sleep or left me dazed and bewildered. I gave a lecture of that ilk when I started working after fellowship--I had become part of the problem. I decided there must be a way to make vent management more understandable and if not interesting, at least bearable.

This post is just to place the vent handout into itunes.

Even when we can't cure a patient, we can relieve suffering. On average, we kind of stink at pain control in the ED. One physician, Dr. Ed Gentile, has created a simple path to optimal acute pain control in the ED. I heard this lecture on the EM:RAP podcast and got permission from Drs. Gentile and Herbert to repost it here. This is not a critical care topic per se, but it is applicable to the critically ill, the non-critically ill--basically any patient who is in pain in the ED.

I received a bunch of emails asking how to get the old episodes into itunes. I expanded the RSS feed to include them, now you just need to bring them into itunes, this 40 second video shows you how.

We're still working on the Greater NY Sepsis Initiative. The next step towards making a non-invasive protocol possible is to teach folks how to use ultrasound of the IVC to assess fluid responsiveness. I developed this video to get ED & ICU docs up to speed. If you can do ANY ultrasound exam, you can do this one.

Aggressive palliative care is just as important as aggressive critical care in the ED. Sometimes we will be the first physicians to talk to a family about end of life issues, even if their loved one is terminally ill. Now that is not how it should be, but it just means that we must be just as skilled at family palliative care discussions as we are at floating a transvenous pacer. In this podcast, I discuss my vision of how to handle palliative care issues in the ED.

Two listener questions answered in 5 minutes. One on awake intubation in trauma and the other on intubating the patient with severe RESP acidosis.