As the long and cold Chicago winter wanes and Spring begins, let’s take a look at the most popular NUEM blogs from 2018. While we value all of our residents’ and experts’ hard work, we are highlighting these 5 posts which earned the most pageviews in calendar year 2018:
5) Auricular Hematoma Drainage
Andrew Berg, Elizabeth Byrne, and Chris Beach take us through the intimidating but fortunately uncommonly needed auricular hematoma drainage.
4) Hand Exam
Terese Wipple, Victor Gappmaier, and Avi Giladi (current Hand surgeon and my former college roommate who got me through organic chem) provide a usable guide to both basic and comprehensive hand exams, and important and common test for an important body part. You’ve really got to respect what they did here.
3) Beta Blocker Toxicity
Spencer Lang, Rachel Haney, and Patrick Lank review beta-blocker toxicity, including but far from limited to the fancier topics of high insulin euglycemic therapy and intralipids.
2) Migraine Cocktail
Headaches can be, well, a headache in the ED. Vidya Eswaran and Danielle Miller put together a comprehensive and digestible infographic collating key points of ED headache management, replete with tips & references. Also fun for me to have space to rant about my practice.
1) HiNTS Exam
Dizziness is one of the most frustrating entities we see in EM, with a handful of needles in a frustrating haystack with few tools to separate the two without turning our hospitals into full time MRI centers. The HiNTS exam gained popularity in the past few years, but has important limitations: easily applied to the wrong dizzy patients and can also be technically difficult to perform in already-dizzy patients. Will LaPlant, Mitali Parmar and Phillip Chang give a comprehensive but concise review of the key points – including how to document your findings. A well-deserved top spot for 2018, and sorry everyone, but it wasn’t even close.
Seth Trueger, MD, MPH, FACEP
Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine Northwestern University