Episode 47: Evidence Based Medicine from NYGH EMU Conference 2014 [link is to podcast and show notes] is an outstanding podcast from Emergency Medicine Cases:
Dr. Walter Himmel (the ‘walking encyclopedia of EM’) gave a fantastic talk from North York General’s Emergency Medicine Update Conference in Toronto, which has been edited with key commentary and summaries into a digestible podcast. Dr. Himmel eloquently shows us, through absolutely stunning personal cases, how evidence based medicine can be appropriately or inappropriately applied in real practice, resulting in major outcome differences for your patients. He elucidates the importance of clinical experience, patient values and ED resources in helping apply the medical literature to your practice. He reviews the essence of critical appraisal, the hierarchy of evidence and how to keep up with the emergency medicine literature. The famous NINDS thrombolysis for stroke trial is distilled down to a few key considerations and the NEJM transfusion for upper GI bleed trial from last year is dissected, analyzed and applied to Dr. Himmel’s personal cases, to help us understand exactly how to avoid BARF – the Brainless Application of Research Findings.
The show notes of the above podcast are outstanding (as they always are on Emergency Medicine Cases).
Here are further resources referenced in the show notes (have not yet reviewed these links below):
To improve your critical appraisal skills of landmark EM articles go to the Global EM Journal Club on the Academic Life in EM blog. Note that coming soon will be the JOURNAL JAM podcast, an EM Cases – ALiEM – Annals of EM collaboration, that summarizes the Global EM Journal Club and interviews the lead authors of the landmark EM articles.
For excellent critical appraisal tools- Ken Milne’s Skeptics Guide to EM BEEM tool kit.
Go here for an in depth discussion with Walter Himmel, Katerina Pavenski & Jeannie Callum on Transfusions, Anticoagulants & Bleeding, where they discuss the upper GI bleed trial as well as transfusions in patients with coronary artery disease, transfusion reactions and more.