Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Residential carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning represents a significant cause of unintentional morbidity and mortality in the United States. Screening by fire departments and utility companies is usually limited to instances in which there are symptoms of CO poisoning or there is activation of a home CO detector. ⋯ Emergency medical services personnel can perform routine CO screening and detect occult elevations in CO levels during 911 responses. Public knowledge of CO poisoning is limited and the use of home CO detectors is rare in this study population.
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Pain studies require prospective patient enrollment to ensure accurate pain assessment. The authors correlated pain assessments of an acute painful episode over a one-week period and determined the accuracy of patient pain severity recall over time. ⋯ Pain severity assessments of acute painful events one and seven days later were similar and highly correlated with initial assessments using both verbal numeric scales. Patients accurately recall the severity of an acute painful episode for at least one week after its occurrence, which may allow retrospective pain assessments.
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To determine whether emergency medicine (EM)-bound and non-EM-bound senior medical students on the EM subinternship have a uniform experience with respect to number and acuity of patients seen and procedures performed. ⋯ In an EM subinternship, experience was variable between EM-bound and non-EM-bound students. Male students saw lower-acuity patients. The EM-bound students saw more patients, higher-acuity patients, and performed more procedures than non-EM-bound cohorts. Emergency medicine educators responsible for medical education should be aware of these differences.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
LET versus EMLA for pretreating lacerations: a randomized trial.
To compare the anesthetic efficacy of EMLA cream (eutectic mixture of local anesthetics) with that of LET solution (lidocaine, epinephrine, tetracaine) for pretreating lacerations prior to lidocaine injection. ⋯ Pretreatment of simple lacerations with LET or EMLA at the time of patient presentation results in similar amounts of pain of subsequent local infiltration of lidocaine
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To determine whether flexion-extension cervical spine radiography (FECSR) is abnormal in children who have sustained blunt cervical spine injury (CSI) when standard cervical spine radiography (SCSR) demonstrates no acute abnormalities. ⋯ In children who underwent acute radiographic evaluation of blunt cervical spine trauma, FECSR was unlikely to be abnormal when no acute abnormality or isolated loss of lordosis was evident on SCSR. In a subset of patients with suspicious findings for occult CSI on SCSR, FECSR was useful in ruling out ligamentous instability in the acute, posttrauma setting.