The lovely and unique Honolulu Convention Center was the scene for the annual gathering of the American Medical Association House of Delegates 2012 Interim Meeting. This meeting was dedicated primarily to the discussion of advocacy issues. Although getting to Honolulu can be a stressful activity, especially for those on the East Coast on the heels of Hurricane Sandy, there was good attendance by every sector of medicine. Emergency physicians were well represented by ACEP’s five delegates and five alternate delegates and by AAEM’s representative.

A Global Survey Snapshot from Emergency Physicians International Issue #9 -  SOURCE // DISPATCHES

Despite the expanding array of video and other imaging laryngoscopes there are some fundamental principles that apply to all new airway devices that emergency physicians should know. Below we review four critical concepts: epiglottoscopy and suctioning, lifting to expand the viewing area, tilting the optics toward the ET tube, and two-stage tube delivery.

A few years ago, on a busy night in my small ED, I had an encounter with a toxic-appearing lung cancer patient with increasing shortness of breath. It didn’t require years of medical training for me to quickly decide that this gentleman required intubation. However, in the spirit of our patient-centered care model, I restrained myself from whipping out my belted laryngoscope on the spot and actually took the time to speak to him and his family.

By winning their contests in Nevada and California respectively, Drs. Joe Heck and Raul Ruiz doubled the number of emergency physicians in Congress

At the 2012 ACEP Scientific Assembly, EPM executive editor Mark Plaster sat down for a live interview with Mark Rosenberg to talk about why palliative care is the most rewarding new frontier for emergency physicians.

Are you in the 700 club? Most emergency physicians are. If you trained in emergency medicine you learned that the work-up of a potentially dangerous headache isn’t finished until the CSF is back. In this month’s SMART EM (www.smartem.org) we flesh out our educational session from ACEP 2012, a talk which asked how many LPs it takes to find one aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage—and what the fallout is.

Hurricane Sandy may have had an androgynous name, but there was nothing ambiguous about the impact this “superstorm” had on New York City, where I live and work. As I pen this article 10 days after the storm, it is shocking to realized that Beth Israel, where I work as an emergency physician, still isn’t back to normal.

Big pharma is paying the price for pushing off-label applications and putting inappropriate pressure on medical education, but is it too little too late? Industry influence runs deeper than you might imagine.

A 39-year-old-male presented to the emergency department with a chief complaint of one day of left-sided facial swelling and weakness. He denied facial pain, rash, vision changes, fever or chills. He had recently returned from a trip to the mountains but denied any bites/stings.