As I scroll through my recent blog posts, I realize I haven’t blogged about my critical care fellowship directly in quite some time. Many of my “lesson” posts are a direct result of things I encountered during my training, but today is a day of reflection as I have now…
The word “dialysis” evokes many clinical indications and contexts. In chronic end-stage renal disease (ESRD), patients typically have some form of long-term access like an AV fistula for their scheduled sessions. In the short term, we’re taught indications for dialysis based on the vowels:
With the growing usage of β-blocker therapy to control everything from atrial fibrillation and congestive heart failure to migraine prophylaxis and essential tremor, we need to be more aware of potential pitfalls due to drug interactions. A classic example is the need for epinephrine in a patient on a non-selective…
Boston was hit by another Nor’easter today, but I have to brave the elements to present my very last journal club as a critical care fellow!
Well, it’s finally over! I just landed back in Boston after spending the morning taking the standardized oral examination (SOE) and objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) at the testing center in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Clostridium difficile (C.diff) infection (CDI) is the most common US healthcare pathogen-associated infection with over 450,000 cases and 29,000 deaths per year. If you work in healthcare, you’ve likely heard of CDI… but where does this bug come from and what can we do about it?
A standard double lung transplantation includes a series of steps involving incision (median sternotomy or clamshell thoracotomy), cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) in many cases, right and left pneumonectomies of the native lungs, preparation of the donor lungs, and implantation of the donor lungs. For the purposes of this post, I’ll talk…
There are several options to get into a critical care fellowship. Our hospital has programs for those who completed residencies in anesthesiology, surgery, internal medicine (IM), or emergency medicine (EM).
This post is supposed to be a primer about billing in critical care. I’ll update it regularly as practices change.
It’s important for the intensive care unit (ICU) treatment team to construct and communicate our daily assessment and plan with all relevant parties involved in a patient’s care. We accomplish this during “rounds” each morning with a team usually led by the ICU fellow consisting of the patient’s nurse, an…