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Conference was a little different this week.  Thanks to all who visited — Sinai EM grad Dr. Roland Merchant of Brown, Professor Paul Klotman, Sinai’s Chair of Medicine, and Dr. Calfee from ID. Also thanks to our own speakers and panelists –Drs. Goodman, Nassisi, Jagoda, Strother and Shoenstein.

Some points I thought bear repeating, or that I want to expand upon:

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Please join us on 10/1 for Emergency Medicine Departmental Conference, in the 8th floor conference room at Elmhurst Hospital.

The day’s planned activities are below:

8am Board Review — Dr. Nick Genes
9am Journal Club — Dr. Rakhee Mahajan
10am Research Lecture Series — Dr. Ula Hwang
11am Blunt Chest Trauma — Dr. Scott Weingart
12pm Toxicology Series — Dr. Ruben Olmedo

Lunch will be served. Please note the early start time.

Residents: The main journal club article for discussion is as follows:

Mongelluzzo J, et al. Corticosteroids and mortality in children with bacterial meningitis. JAMA. 2008 May 7;299(17):2048-55. PMID: 18460665

 Some background reading on steroids in meningitis is always advisable — please start with this brief recent review.

 Some announcements:

– Jennifer has posted a nice summary of Braden’s recent journal club on MRSA abscess management. Check it out! And leave some comments.

– The NYC Marathon is 11/2 and Dr. Montagna is organizing our participation. Our location is still TBA, and location dictates your time commitment… but you can be sure that a free T-Shirt is involved. Also a poncho. There’s semi-mandatory prep meetings on 10/27 or 10/28 but if you’re at ACEP you might be ok. More info in her email.

– Don’t forget our high school football sideline doc opportunities. This program pays well and gets you some good experience. The schedule’s online — but email me and I’ll put you in touch with the Ortho residents organizing it.

– If you haven’t been back to Elmhurst in a while, please review the new policies.

– Seniors: another leadership seminar is planned, this time with Dr. Gail D’Onofrio, on Tuesday evening, 10/7. Location TBA but likely a restaurant.

If you’ve got more announcements to share, let me know.

That is the question…

And a group of researchers at the Integrated Soft Tissue Infection Services (ISIS) Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital attempted to answer it with a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial (Editor’s note: This Journal Club recap, written by guest-blogger Jennifer, covers a paper by Rajendran et al. in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Nov. 2007; pdf and background articles here). Patients who met rather broad inclusion criteria (including febrile and immune deficient patients) were treated with incision and drainage, and then randomized to receive either cephalexin or placebo.

The results? There was no significant difference between the “treatment” arm of the study and the “placebo” arm of the study.

Although the study design seems reasonable, several holes in the investigators’ plan were brought up at this month’s Journal Club.

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Please join us for Emergency Medicine Department Conference on Wednesday, September 24th at 9AM in Mount Sinai’s Hatch Auditorium.

Our featured speaker is Sinai EM grad and noted HIV researcher, Dr. Roland Clay Merchant. We’ll also have a joint conference with ID and the chair of Medicine, Dr. Paul Klotman, will speak on challenges facing his department.

9am Grand Rounds - Dr. Roland Clay Merchant
10am Visiting Chair Lecture Series — Dr. Paul Klotman
10:30am ED Stroke Education: Dr. Yvonne Chan
11am ID in the ED: Infection Control at Sinai
12pm Peds Core: Shock — Dr. Chris Strother
1pm Peds M&M — Dr. Schoenstein

Lunch will be served and breakfast amenities will be provided.

Location TBA

Dr. Lewis Goldfrank’s lecture on alcohol withdrawal is now up on the Conference page.  Give it another listen, as Dr. Goldfrank is a very engaging and provocative speaker. And be sure to review our own Dr. Olmedo’s chapter on withdrawal syndromes, which includes a great section on alcohol.

As for my senior lecture, there were many topics I didn’t get to include — so let me just point you to a few excellent articles and some practical tips:

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Please join us this week for Emergency Medicine Departmental Conference, in the 8th floor conference room at Elmhurst Hospital.

The day’s activities are planned as follows:

9am Toxicology Lecture Series: Crystal Meth — Dr. Amish Shah
10am Journal Club — Dr. Hexom
11am Thermal Emergencies: Dr. Scot Hill
12pm Disaster Lecture Series: Perspectives from War — Dr. Maria O’Rourke

Lunch will be served.

Residents: Journal club articles are available.

On Wednesday 9/17 we’ll have our second Journal Club of the year, presented by Braden Hexom.

We are asking residents to access the following journal club articles by entering the login and password from my email:

Primary discussion: Rajendran et al. Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial of Cephalexin for Treatment of Uncomplicated Skin Abscesses in a Population at Risk for Community-Acquired Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infection. Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Nov. 2007, p. 4044–4048. PMID: 17846141

Clinical background:  Frazee et al. High Prevalence of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus in Emergency Department Skin and Soft Tissue Infections. Annals of Emergency Medicine 2005. Volume 45, no. 3. PMID: 15726056

Clinical background: Rajendran et al. Antibiotic Use in the Treatment of Soft Tissue Abscesses: A Survey of Current Practice. Surgical Infections 2007 Volume 8, p 237-238. PMID: 17437370