More Dogma: Epinephrine in Digital Nerve Blocks
You are working as an EM resident and have just evaluated a patient with a right long finger DIP joint dislocation. You perform a digital nerve block with 1% lidocaine with 1:100,000 epinephrine, and go to present to your attending before attempting the reduction. Your attending, on hearing about the epinephrine use goes berserk, and says “don’t you know that you shouldn’t use epi in fingers, noses, ears and toes?”.
When confronted with this situation we all like to have a one stop valid literature review to produce that validates our practice. Several social media authors have weighed in on this topic, however blogs sometimes don’t cut it for those unfamiliar with the current quality of peer reviewed online content.
The use of epinephrine in digital nerve blocks has been shown to increase duration of action for the anesthetic, and to allow the avoidance of bupivacaine, thereby decreasing the pain of the injection. (REBEL flashback) Read more →
So you are minding your own business working in the ED at Big Hospital, when two dudes (paramedics) bring in a patient with abdominal pain. As luck would have it, this person has a perforated bowel and needs surgery pretty quickly. AND they are on, yes you guessed it… Wait for it… Dabigatran! You consult your local surgeon and she scratches her scrub cap. “I may not want to take that person to surgery? Let me check with my resources and get back…”
Recently, I just finished reading a book called Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. This book is a game changer in the presentation world in my humble opinion. If you are giving presentations at any level, this is a must read book. Now I know that REBEL EM has traditionally been a clinical blog, but every once in a while we come across something that is just too good to not share. What I am going to try and do in this blog post is summarize some of the key messages of this book. In the book the author basically breaks presentations down into 3 parts and applies principles from the art of Zen:
As we have discussed in previous posts, the care of patients with cardiac arrest is a key skill for Emergency Providers. ACLS provides a foundation for care but is rife with shortcomings including, but not limited to, reliance on outdated data and inability to adapt in the face of improved understanding of cardiac arrest pathophysiology. The incorporation of technological advances and skills is another massive limitation of ACLS. One of these technologies is point of care ultrasound (POCUS).
Welcome to the August 2015 REBELCast, where Swami, Matt, and I are going to tackle a couple of topics. First topic: renal colic. Renal colic is a commonly seen condition encountered in emergency departments and the use of medical expulsive therapy (MET) is commonly recommended by our urology colleagues. Proponents of MET in the treatment of ureteric colic advocate for them due to their potential ability to increase stone passage, reduce pain medication use, and reduce urologic interventions. Second topic: pediatric weights. In pediatric resuscitations many of use the Broselow tape to predict weights for dosing of medications. With the increasing weights in pediatric patients seen in developed countries around the world, does the commonly used Broselow tape accurately predict weights? So with that introduction today we are going to specifically tackle:
