Medical Category: Infectious Disease

Background: The Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines recommend an initial fixed volume of 30mL/kg of IDEAL body weight within the first 3 hours of resuscitation (weak recommendation, low-quality evidence). [2].  Additionally, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign Guidelines state there is insufficient evidence …

Background: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians were looking for practical, widely available, and low-cost interventions to help patients with hypoxemia.  One of those interventions was awake prone positioning.  Potential mechanisms of benefit in awake proning include more uniform distribution …

Take Home Points Emergency medicine revolves around the differential diagnosis History and physical exam should significantly narrow your differential diagnosis Have an idea of what specific diagnoses are being ruled out when ordering diagnostic tests Always consider the most life-threatening and …

Take Home Points Be prepared to do everything with these cases, if they can’t provide information, dive into their medication list, history, contact whoever you have to to get more information Keep differentials wide – then approach these cases with …

Take Home Points Look for the red flags – hypotension, environmental exposures, medications (SS, NMS), SIRS/qSOFA criteria Be on the lookout for neutropenic fever – isolate patients, administer abx early, and admit Sepsis definition is changing all the time – …