ACEP

Here: tips from top articles culled from the emergency medical literature, with take-home lessons for primary care.

Attention to detail and a systematic approach combined with the knowledge and use of specific diagnostic exam tests will help minimize missing common orthopedic soft tissue injuries. Tips here.

Awareness of medical conditions and drugs that can suppress the immune system or cause other complications is key to providing safe and appropriate care for immunosuppressed patients. Details here.

Parents with overweight children did not perceive the extra weight as a health risk.

A significant proportion of patients who visit emergency departments (EDs) with opioid overdoses (ODs) also suffer from comorbid mental health disorders, circulatory diseases, and respiratory diseases, according to the results of a new study presented on October 14, 2013, at the American College of Emergency Physicians annual meeting in Seattle.

Keeping your patients satisfied can help keep you sane-and possibly even happy. Here: strategies for enhancing clinician/patient communications.

Here: a fruitful approach to the evaluation of dizziness that focuses on timing, triggers, and associated symptoms, followed by a complaint-directed physical exam with special attention to specific germane aspects of the neurologic exam and (when indicated) selective testing.

A new study from Mississippi shows not only a steady increase in ED visits by patients with diabetes mellitus, but also a steady increase in the prevalence of patients with this disease.

Here: strategies for making the exam more comfortable and efficient, and tips for using topical anesthetics, removing earwax, extracting a plantar foreign body, and approaching the Dx of appendicitis.

The “take home” from this presentation: be cautious with inappropriate use of drugs with or without black box warnings, but maintain a healthy skepticism about some of these warnings. Cases in point: droperidol, antidepressants, clindamycin.