29 Sep 2016

September 29, 2016

Written by REBEL Crit
  This blog post is the second part of a series of 3, on a recent lecture I was asked to give  on Critical Care Updates: Resuscitation Sequence Intubation. This talk was mostly derived from a podcast by Scott Weingart (Twitter: @EMCrit) where he talked about the physiologic killers during preintubation and perintubation. In this podcast, Scott mentions the HOp killers: Hypotension, Hypoxemia, and Metabolic Acidosis (pH) as the physiologic causes of pre-intubation/peri-intubation morbidity and mortality. Taking care of these critically ill patients that require intubation can be a high stress situation, with little room for error.  In part two of this series we will discuss some useful strategies at the bedside to help us reduce pre-intubation/peri-intubation hypoxemia.
Medical Categories: Resuscitation
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26 Sep 2016

September 26, 2016

Written by REBEL Crit
  This blog post is the first part of a series of 3, on a recent lecture I was asked to give  on Critical Care Updates: Resuscitation Sequence Intubation. This talk was mostly derived from a podcast by Scott Weingart (Twitter: @EMCrit) where he talked about the physiologic killers during preintubation and perintubation. In this podcast, Scott mentions the HOp killers: Hypotension, Hypoxemia, and Metabolic Acidosis (pH) as the physiologic causes of pre-intubation/peri-intubation morbidity and mortality. Taking care of these critically ill patients that require intubation can be a high stress situation, with little room for error.  In part one of this series we will discuss some useful strategies at the bedside to help us reduce pre-intubation/peri-intubation hypotension.
Medical Categories: Resuscitation
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22 Sep 2016

September 22, 2016

Written by REBEL CME, REBEL Crit
The focus of this talk is on how to cognitively offload our minds as we are running a resuscitation. ACLS provides us with a framework in treating adult victims of Cardiac Arrest (CA) or other cardiopulmonary emergencies. This helps get providers who don't commonly deal with CA, to improve things, such as the quality of CPR, minimizing interruptions during CPR for pulse checks, and the timing/dosing of epinephrine. Emergency Medicine (EM) and the prehospital world are different than many environments in medicine. We get minimal information at the time of patient arrival while at the same time the disease process that is taking place has not quite defined itself.  We are constantly expected to acutely manage and resuscitate anyone who comes in our doors 24-7-365, many times without crucial information. Our job therefore should be to ensure coronary and cerebral perfusion are at their highest quality, but also simultaneously putting the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out why our patient is in CA. It can be very difficult to do both and many times we sacrifice one for the other. It is therefore important to cognitively offload ourselves during the resuscitation of our patients in CA and focus our attention on why they are in CA. As a disclosure for this lecture I did state that some of the recommendations made have evidence to support them and others are more theoretical and certainly up for discussion.
Medical Categories: Resuscitation
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5 Sep 2016

September 5, 2016

Written by REBEL Cast
Background: Welcome back to the September 2016 REBEL Cast. We are back with another episode and I am super excited about this episode because we are going to talk about two papers just published in the Resuscitation Journal on management of refractory ventricular fibrillation. It is a well known fact that the cornerstones for survival from Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) have always been early, high quality CPR and early defibrillation in patients with shockable rhythms (i.e. Ventricular Fibrillation/Ventricular Tachycardia). Some patients with shockable rhythms may be refractory to standard defibrillation therapy (i.e. refractory VF). Even more frustrating, there is truly a dearth of data on what to do with these patients. One strategy that has been reported more and more in the literature is double sequential defibrillation (DSD). Another issue in cardiac arrest patients is we frequently give boluses of 1mg epinephrine every 3 – 5 minutes as is outlined in the ACLS guidelines.  When patients have minimal cardiac output, the buildup of catecholamines may potentially cause refractory ventricular fibrillation (RVF).  This could be due to an increase myocardial oxygen consumption causing an increase in myocardial ischemia, and ultimately more difficulty in successful defibrillation.  But maybe by blocking the beta-adrenergic receptors in the myocardium, we can block the beta effects of the catecholamines and potentially increase the chances of successful sustained ROSC.
Medical Categories: Cardiovascular, Resuscitation
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22 Aug 2016

August 22, 2016

Written by REBEL EM
Background: In the pyramid of evidence based medicine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered to be one of the most reliable study designs when evaluating the cause and effect of treatment modalities. When evaluating randomized controlled trials, we often look for statistical significance of a study to determine if a treatment has an effect.  Statistical significance means that the result of a study is unlikely to occur by chance alone.  The value assigned to a statistically significant result is typically a p-value less than 0.05.
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