Annals of emergency medicine
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Annals of Emergency Medicine collaborated with an educational Web site, Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) to host a public discussion featuring the 2014 Annals article on the outpatient management of patients with a spontaneous pneumothorax by using pigtail catheters. The objective was to curate a 14-day (November 10 to 23, 2014) worldwide academic dialogue among clinicians about the article. Four online facilitators hosted the multimodal discussion on the ALiEM Web site, Twitter, and Google Hangout. ⋯ Blog comments, tweets, and video expert commentary involving the featured article are summarized and reported. The dialogue resulted in 1,023 page views from 347 cities in 49 countries on the ALiEM Web site, 279,027 Twitter impressions, and 88 views of the video interview with experts. This Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club created a virtual community of practice from around the world and identified common themes around the management of spontaneous pneumothorax, which included substantial practice variation in regard to inpatient versus outpatient management, location of chest tube, the use of aspiration, and chest radiography after placement.
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Publication bias compromises the validity of systematic reviews. This problem can be addressed in part through searching clinical trials registries to identify unpublished studies. This study aims to determine how often systematic reviews published in emergency medicine journals include clinical trials registry searches. ⋯ Systematic reviews published in emergency medicine journals do not routinely include searches of clinical trials registries. By helping authors identify unpublished trial data, the addition of registry searches may improve the validity of systematic reviews.
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Cricothyrotomy is a rare but crucial procedure in the armamentarium of the emergency physician. The infrequency with which it is performed has led to a reliance on models, simulators, and animals in resident education, but each of these methods has unique drawbacks. ⋯ Obtaining consent maintains the integrity of the relationship among the physician, the deceased, the family, and the community and need not prohibit performing procedures on the newly dead for the purpose of resident education. Thus, a balanced approach to resident instruction that incorporates the use of the deceased in addition to other methods of instruction seems both prudent and feasible.