Articles related to Emergency Medicine

Often undiagnosed due to its unspecific symptoms, hereditary angioedema (HAE) is a tricky condition that causes many patients unnecessary suffering with unnecessary surgeries and invasive diagnostic/therapeutic interventions. Read on to educate yourself on some of the alarming numbers on the orphan disease.   

After diagnosis during a partial mastectomy, this patient’s estimated blood loss was 58 mL, causing anemia and requiring a red blood cell transfusion along with ventriculoperitoneal drain placement. With a substantive bleeding history before the diagnosis, what would you do next with this patient? Work her up for von Willebrand disease? Do a complete blood count test to look at platelet count, a peripheral smear to look at the morphology of the platelets, and a coagulation profile? Offer genetic testing for fibrinogen disorders? What would your next steps be? Read the full case presentation and expert opinion to see how your peers responded.

The FDA added a warning that Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine may trigger Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) in a small number of people. Of the 12.5 million Americans who received this vaccine, about 100 people reported having GBS, which is an acquired demyelinating polyneuropathy that often begins in the lower extremities and ascends over time with loss of reflexes, causing muscle weakness, or in the most severe cases, paralysis.

According to a study of 135,000 doctors by Doximity, male physicians made, on average, 28% more than females in 2020, a 3% increase from the 2019 numbers. The survey, along with Medscape’s poll in 2021 that showed male specialist physicians overall making 33% more than females, points to a few other large gender pay gaps, as well as some in which women doctors make salaries closer to those of men.

There are several reasons why the COVID-19 Delta variant – responsible for the COVID crisis in India – has public health experts and doctors concerned, including its transmissibility and disease severity. You likely already know the Delta “variant of concern” is more contagious than previous variants (denoted by the Greek alphabet), but here are five other important details you should be aware of.

In this article/podcast from KevinMD.com, the author encourages readers to make some adjustments in their life to reduce the professional and personal risks associated with the stakeholders who target physicians, including corporate America, the government, patients, and the financial industry. The commentary is a response to President Biden’s multi-trillion spending plan, which targets rich corporations and wealthy individual Americans making more than $400,000.