LITFL Review 276

Welcome to the 276th 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

Vitamin C in Sepsis has been all over social media and the lay press as the “cure” for severe sepsis and septic shock. Now dubbed as the Marik Protocol, many blogs have written about this treatment, as listed below. [SR]

• Steve Mathieu at The Bottom Line: An Orange a Day Keeps Sepsis at Bay?
• Ryan Radecki at EMLit of Note: Vitamin C for Sepsis
• Josh Farkas at PulmCrit (EMCrit):Metabolic Sepsis Resuscitation – The Evidence Behind Vitamin C
• Scott Weingart on EMCrit: Paul Marik on the Metabolic Resuscitation of Sepsis
• Pharmacy Joe: Vitamin C, Hydrocortisone, and Thiamine for Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock
• Adam Rieves at Everyday EBM: Vitamin C in Sepsis – Splashes in the Popular Press

The Best of #FOAMed Emergency Medicine

• CRACKCast is at it again, this time reviewing core content on acute pelvic pain in women. [MG]

The Best of #FOAMcc Critical Care

• ScanCrit + REBEL EM discusses the importance of fever in sepsis, not for identification but for outcomes. [AS]
• Jonny Wilkinson of Critical care Northampton has compressed many of the pearls from the recent ISICEM meeting into a single post. Nice one mate! [SO]
• The Bottom line discuss the LEVO-CTS study, looking at the use of levosimendan in patients with LV dysfunction undergoing cardiac surgery. [SO]

The Best of #FOAMres Resuscitation

• Rory Spiegel asks why mechanical CPR has not shown any advantages over traditional CPR in a new thoughtful EMNerd post. [SO, SR]

The Best of #FOAMtox Toxicology

• The Poison Review gives us an update on VX nerve agent in light of recent events. [MG]
• Emdocs discuss the use of sodium acetate as an alternative to sodium bicarbonate when treating toxidromes. [SO]

The Best of #FOAMped Pediatrics

• Edward Snelson is back with an absolute stormer of a post on how bias can be your friend in PEM, but it’s fickle little devil. [CC]
• Dropped on 1st of April, but this is no April Fools joke – foreign bodies in the head and neck. Tim delivers to his usual excellent standard. [JS]
• Some PEM papers that have caught the eye of the DFTB Bubble Wrap team. [JS]

The Best of #FOANed Nursing

• Comprehensive ‘how-to’ on assessing the peripheral IV cannula. [JS]
• A great simple guide to the different types of strokes by Rehab Clinical Nurse Specialist, Sally Moyle. [JS]

The Best of #FOAMim Internal Medicine

• Great new podcast, recommended by Casey Parker, is called IMReasoning. The hosts of the show are Nicolas Szecket and Art Nahill. This week is a “Stump the Chumps” case out of the pages of the NEJM. [SR,ML]
• This week’s Louisville Lectures on Reflections on “Hearing Voices” with Dr. André Churchwell is not on what you think. [ML]

The Best of #MedEd FOAM and #FOAMsim

• A woman in the Emergency Department. Excellent post on emDocs.net by Hilary Fairbrother on some (but by no means all) of the challenges women face in creating a life in medicine. [AS]
• Ross Fisher discusses the pursuit of perfect in delivery in this post.  Take the time to read and reflect on how you prepare for that talk. [CC]

LITFL Weekly Review Team

Reference Sources and Reading List

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