LITFL Review 145

Welcome to the 145th LITFL Review! Your regular and reliable source for the highest highlights, sneakiest sneak peeks and loudest shout-outs from the webbed world of emergency medicine and critical care. Each week the LITFL team casts the spotlight on the blogosphere’s best and brightest, and deliver a bite-sized chunk of Global FOAM.

The Most Fair Dinkum Ripper Beauts of the Week

The Ripper award this week heads over to INTENSIVE’s Steve McGloughlin who gave a fascinating infectious diseases talk at smaccGOLD on the The Dying Traveller – a must listen. [KG, CN]

The Best of #FOAMed Emergency Medicine

• Ryan Radecki explains the difference between can and should in discussing the use of absorbable sutures for extremity and trunk lacerations [AS]
• What’s better than an ECG? Serial ECGs, of course. Amal Mattu discusses the importance of serial ECGs in patients with ongoing or changing symptoms. [AS]
• Chicken or the Egg?  Did the altered mental status result from the trauma or did the trauma result from the altered mental status. Amal Mattu reviews a great trauma ECG teasing out a medical cause of trauma. [AS]
• Lauren Westafer offers a different set of ABCs in her blog post covering the basics of End of Life Care in the ED. The post also has a great lecture with audio and screen capture of slides to check out. [AS]

The Best of #FOAMcc Critical Care

• By now you have no excuse to not have a free subscription to Rob MacSweeney’s Critical Care Reviews Newsletter rounding the week’s medical literature – FOAMcc at its best. [CN]
• EDECMO Episode 11 – The Paris ECMO Course: Scott talks to Joe Belezzo and shares some insights from the Paris ECMO course. Fascinating stuff, though lot’s of differences from how we intensivist-led peripheral ECMO cannulation at The Alfred. Food for thought! [CN]

The Best of #FOAMtox Toxicology

• Leon Gussow reviews a recent paper detailing two cases of patients presenting post-ingestion of laboratory-proven 25B-NBOMe and 25C-NBOMe toxicity. Marketed as ‘synthetic LSD’, this drug is definitely not LSD [JAR]
• When is too much caffeine too much? Leon discusses an interesting case series discussing deaths where caffeine has been implicated. Not quite what the title reports but interesting read [JAR]
• The latest episode of Toxtalk is out with this episodes discussing mustard toxicity– not the type that goes with a hot dog or a nice porterhouse steak! [JAR]
• Ever heard of guanfacine? This extended-release, clonidine-like drug used for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has the potential to cause significant sedation even with low doses. Leon discusses at The Poison Review [JAR]
• Want to brush up on cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome? Leon discusses a recent review that’s worth looking at [JAR]

The Best of #MedEd FOAM and #FOAMsim

• In Just who or what am I evaluating? Learning from #smaccGOLD Damian Roland gives the background to his talk on ‘Evaluating Education’ – it includes the video of his fascinating talk. [CN]

LITFL Weekly Review Team

Reference Sources and Reading List

• #FOAMed – #FOAMcc – #FOAMres
• #FOAMped – #FOAMtox – #FOAMus
• #FOAMim – #FOANed