Background: Providing adequate paralysis and appropriate sedation is challenging in patients with obesity during rapid sequence intubation (RSI). Pharmacokinetic parameters play an important role in dosing of rocuronium due to low lipophilicity. Rocuronium may be dosed based on ideal body weight (IBW).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Pract Cases Emerg Med
February 2022
Case Presentation: Arteriovenous malformations (AVM) have a variety of clinically significant manifestations. This report details a patient who presented with unilateral conjunctiva injection, which was found to be due to an atypical manifestation of an AVM with a large draining vein mimicking carotid cavernous fistula.
Discussion: While imaging for patients presenting with eye pain and unilateral conjunctiva injection is not always warranted, emergency physicians should keep their differential diagnosis broad and pursue additional workup when warning signs of more sinister pathology present.
Background: Acute stress impairs physician decision-making and clinical performance in resuscitations. Mental skills training, a component of the multistep, cognitive-behavioral technique of stress inoculation, modulates stress response in high-performance fields.
Objective: We assessed the effects of mental skills training on emergency medicine (EM) residents' stress response in simulated resuscitations as well as residents' perceptions of this intervention.
Due to the healthcare burden associated with migraines, prompt and effective treatment is vital to improve patient outcomes and ED workflow. This was a prospective, randomized, double-blind trial. Adults who presented to the ED with a diagnosis of migraine from August of 2019 to March of 2020 were included.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The emergency department (ED) has long served as a safety net for the uninsured and those with limited access to routine healthcare. This study aimed to compare the characteristics and severity of ED visits in an Illinois academic medical center (AMC) and community hospital (CH) of a single health system before and after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Methods: This was a retrospective record review of 357,764 ED visits from January 1, 2011-December 31, 2016, of which 74% were at the AMC and 26% at the CH.
Clin Pract Cases Emerg Med
May 2019
Paraneoplastic syndromes may be the only presenting manifestation of an otherwise occult malignancy. This case report highlights a patient presenting to the emergency department with an atypical, multi-system disease, ultimately leading to a diagnosis of mucocutaneous paraneoplastic syndrome secondary to classical Hodgkin's lymphoma. Emergency physicians should maintain a high clinical suspicion for paraneoplastic syndromes when patients present with multi-system manifestations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Our objective was to compare outcomes of discharge disposition, need for additional medications, and restraint use for patients who received inhaled loxapine compared with patients receiving traditional antipsychotic drugs in the emergency department (ED).
Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted on all patients who presented to the ED with agitation and received antipsychotic therapy, including loxapine, ziprasidone, or haloperidol from December 1, 2014, through October 31, 2016.
Results: The mean time from physician assignment to medical clearance was 7.