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HWN Suggests

A Practical Approach to Abdominal Imaging

Any third year medical student worth their salt can tell you to get the RUQ ultrasound for the fat, fertile, forty year-old female with RUQ abdominal pain, fever, positive Murphy’s sign, and leukocytosis. However, my patients don’t usually fit the textbook, and I’m often thinking about what I might miss or see with test X vs test Y...

I’ll touch on a few common dilemmas where the optimal choice of imaging modality isn’t immediately clear by focusing on what you actually gain or lose by ordering one imaging test over another.

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Featured

  Bariatric Emergencies

Being familiar with the anatomy of these various procedures is essential to understanding the complications and why you cannot be reassured by a benign abdominal examination.

  Geriatics

Abdominal pain is one of the most frequent reasons that elderly people visit the emergency department (ED). In this article, we review the deadliest causes of abdominal pain in this population, including mesenteric ischemia, abdominal aortic aneurysm, and appendicitis and potentially lethal non-abdominal causes.

  Neonatal Intestinal Emergencies

In almost every case of intestinal obstruction the neonate will present with vomiting.

 Pediatric GI Emergencies

Bilious vomiting, medical speaking, means emesis that appears like cooked, green spinach – not the yellow color that parents often mean. While sometimes normal in older children with gastroenteritis, in neonates or anyone sick appearing, this represents a surgical emergency such as volvulus, malrotation, necrotizing enterocolitis etc.

Articles of Interest

Gastrointestinal Emergencies

This book answers key questions asked by emergency clinicians faced with complex gastrointestinal and abdominal pain presentations. Instead of a traditional format that includes epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment options, this book takes an approach that mirrors the way clinicians interact with patients by asking and answering specific clinical care questions.

GI Emergencies

Review of the more common presentations.

Gi Emergencies A Quick Reference Guide

Lukasz Czaru... so many fake sites. this is the first one which worked!

GI Emergencies – Chris Gray at #StEmlynsLIVE

33 year old, vomiting blood, blood pressure 70 systolic. 6 minutes. Crap.

Liver Emergencies

For such a large organ, EM physicians spend proportionally little time thinking about the liver. Sure, we’re often in the neighborhood (whether it be doing a FAST or diagnosing biliary disease), but the liver really doesn’t get the credit it’s due.

Pediatric Gastrointestinal Emergencies Answer Sheet

Good review...

Academic Life in Emergency Medicine (ALiEM) Blog and Podcast Watch: Gastrointestinal Emergencies

We summarize the accredited posts on gastrointestinal emergencies that met our a priori determined quality criteria per evaluation by eight experienced faculty educators in EM.

Clinical Decision Rules in the Evaluation and Management of Adult Gastrointestinal Emergencies

Several clinical decision rules (CDRs) have been developed for the diagnosis and management of patients with suspected acute appendicitis and upper GI bleeding to identify those patients who may safely forgo further testing or hospital admission. Further validation studies demonstrating the superiority of these CDRs over contemporary practice are needed.

Resources

5 GI emergencies EMTs, paramedics should know

By understanding the anatomy and physiology, as well as specific knowledge about potentially critical conditions, EMS providers can differentiate serious medical emergencies from minor belly pain complaints.

8.1 Gastrointestinal emergencies

The two most common causes of gastrointestinal emergencies are appendicitis and intestinal obstruction