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Dr. Hoxhaj gave a great presentation at the beginning of my intern year, on some of the top papers in emergency medicine published this . His criteria for excellence? They were either landmark works that changed EM practice, or well-conducted research with surprising conclusions that challenged dogma and made us think. Or, as he said, he's just messing with us.

Over the next few weeks, I'll post some of these papers here, as blog entries. Each post will have a link to the papers mentioned, plus some of his commentary gleaned from his slides. Feel free to add your own comments (especially if you're Dr. Hoxhaj).

The first papers I wanted to mention involve wound care — specifically, some novel, and maybe cavalier, ways of treating lacerations.

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Beth Y. Ginsburg just lectured us last week on the toxicology of anti-diabetic drugs… She was once a resident in our program and is now joining the crew at Elmhurst. She wrote, with Dr. Sharma, an article on umbilical hernia rupture and evisceration (pdf) in a recent JEM (Vol 30, No 2, Feb '06). Check it out!

By the way, JEM has pretty much cornered the market on articles about leaky belly buttons in recent months…

Oh yes, Conference Journal Club will be a duel this week, featuring two chiefs – nearing retirement, holding back nothing, fighting for their honor and their patients' cortex… Heads will roll.

Marc's paper is available here — it's a classic, the NINDS trial from 1995 (NEJM 333:1581-1587), predating Marc's arrival at Sinai (which historians believe occurred sometime during Clinton's second term). Many of the interns were still in high school in 1995, but otherwise, pretty much nothing has changed in medicine.

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Annals was mostly about airway this month, and felt a little sparse (Levitan showed that BURP and cricoid pressure worsen the view compared to bimanual laryngoscopy– stop the presses! Also, a letter to the editor advocated for the mnemonic LEMONS over LEMON — the extra S is for O2 saturation, which of course you might otherwise fail to consider as you're prepping to intubate… sheesh).

So, instead, I thought I'd hit up that other noteworthy periodical, the New England Journal of Medicine. This week (June 1, 2006, Vol 354, No. 22) they've got an article (pdf) from the PIOPED II study about the diagnostic value of CT angio alone, vs. CT angio plus CT venography of leg veins.

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