Lightning Strike Injuries.

Lightning is a common environmental hazard, and is a significant cause of global injury and death. Care and evaluation should follow general trauma guidelines, but several unique aspects of lightning injuries necessitate deviations from standard care that can improve survival and overall outcomes. When evaluating lightning strike patients, some common injury patterns are pathognomonic for lightning strikes and easy to recognize, while others are subtle and require heightened awareness.

Managing hospitalized patients with a COPD exacerbation: the role of hospitalists and the multidisciplinary team.

Exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are associated with high rates of hospitalizations, costs, and morbidity. Therefore, hospitalists and the multidisciplinary team (hospital team) need to take a proactive approach to ensure patients are effectively managed from hospital admission to postdischarge. Comprehensive screening and diagnostic testing of patients at admission will enable an accurate diagnosis of COPD exacerbations, and severity, as well as other factors that may impact the length of hospital stay.

Emergency medicine residency training in Africa: overview of curriculum.

Background: Emergency Medicine (EM) is a rapidly developing specialty in Africa with several emergency medicine residency-training programs (EMRPs) established across the continent over the past decade. Despite rapid proliferation of the specialty, little is known about emergency care curriculum structure and content. We provide an overview of Africa's EMRPs.

Reversal agents for oral anticoagulants.

For more than half a century, warfarin, a vitamin K antagonist, has been the anticoagulant of choice. However, direct oral anticoagulants are rapidly gaining in popularity, which poses the need for efficacious reversal agents. This review article summarizes the strategies and agents used to reverse oral anticoagulants.

Improving quality of life and decreasing readmissions in heart failure patients in a multidisciplinary transition-to-care clinic.

Objectives: The purpose was to pilot the feasibility and impact of a 4-week transition-to-care program on quality of life for heart failure patients.

Background: The transition from the acute care to the outpatient setting has been shown to be a critical time with heart failure patients.

Methods: A pre- and post-test design was used.

Vestibular deficits leading to disequilibrium and falls in ambulatory amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Objective: To assess vestibular deficits in response to disequilibrium in ambulatory individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ambALS).

Design: All participants completed standard protocols for the Sensory Organization Test (SOT) by computerized dynamic posturography.

Setting: Multidisciplinary amyotrophic lateral sclerosis clinic at an academic medical center.

Ultrasound-guided oblique approach for peripheral venous access in a phantom model.

Background: Ultrasound (US) vascular guidance is traditionally performed in transverse (T) and longitudinal (L) axes, each with drawbacks. We hypothesized that the introduction of a novel oblique (O) approach would improve the success of US-guided peripheral venous access. We examined emergency physician (EP) performance using the O approach in a gel US phantom.