Emergency Medicine

America's future doctors are increasingly interested in become primary-care physicians -- good news for America's future patients. Friday was “Match Day,” the day when fourth-year medical students find out where they'll be doing their internships and residencies. The process resembles sorority rush week: Students and teaching hospitals first try to impress each other, then they rank each other in order of preference. A computer sorts through all those preferences and spits out the matches, which were made public at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

America's future doctors are increasingly interested in become primary-care physicians -- good news for America's future patients. Friday was “Match Day,” the day when fourth-year medical students find out where they'll be doing their internships and residencies. The process resembles sorority rush week: Students and teaching hospitals first try to impress each other, then they rank each other in order of preference. A computer sorts through all those preferences and spits out the matches, which were made public at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

"Grey's Anatomy" "Freedom" episode ABC, May 22 (two-hour season finale) The premise: Andrew Langston, 19, is hanging out with friends at a construction site. Trying to impress his friend Lola with his daring, he lies in wet cement. As it begins to dry into concrete, he is trapped. By the time he can be transported to Seattle Grace Hospital, almost four hours have passed.

Nearly 20% of patients who are discharged from hospitals return for acute care within 30 days, researchers reported Tuesday. The team, led by Yale emergency medicine researcher Dr. Anita A. Vashi, scoured records collected between July 2008 and September 2009 that reported on 4,028,555 patients in California, Florida and Nebraska. They found that 17.9% of hospitalizations resulted in at least one hospital-based “acute care encounter” within 30 days, including readmissions for inpatient care and emergency department visits.

The premise Nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is having trouble managing her growing addiction to painkillers. Nevertheless, she continues to snort an opiate in the supply room and pop pills in the bathroom during shifts at the hospital. Jackie works in the busy emergency room, where she helps take care of a boy who wedged a dental mirror up his nose because he was trying to see his brain. Later, another young man is brought in after being found crushed under 2 tons of books (he and his father were part of a moving team that were clearing a library that was closing)

John Fowler was a member of UCLA's 1976 Rose Bowl championship team and was the Bruins' fourth-leading tackler in 1977. He was a pretty fair rugby player too and liked that sport a little better because, he says, "I got to run with the ball." Fowler married Dianne Frierson, an excellent UCLA basketball player and the starting point guard on the teams that starred Ann Meyers and won a national championship. In other words, this was a typical jock union, right?

The patient was drunk and he wanted sleeping pills, but the doctor refused him a prescription. So he returned to the small emergency room in rural North Carolina late one night with a revolver tucked into his belt. He was stalking Dr. Perry McLimore, aiming for revenge. Out of the corner of his eye, the doctor spotted the man and his gun. He ducked, grabbing a flimsy curtain for cover, but the bullet grazed his left shoulder.

"Match Day" is a sort of March Madness for med students. It's the time of year when seniors in medical schools throughout the country are matched with residency programs. Though the fine points of the process likely only matter to those craving a spot, the residency offerings do offer a glimpse of our future specialists, if not our general practitioners. The not-for-profit National Resident Matching Program on Thursday placed more than 16,000 U.S. medical students in a record 26,000 residency programs.

President Bush will nominate Jeffrey Runge, a North Carolina doctor trained in emergency medicine, as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the White House said. Runge, if confirmed by the Senate, would be the fourth physician to serve as the nation's top auto-safety regulator. Runge is assistant chairman of emergency medicine at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte and is an expert in motor vehicle injury care and prevention.

Many emergency rooms are staffed by doctors who have never received special training in the basics of trauma care--how to treat a heart attack or handle a head injury, for instance--and the result is hit-or-miss treatment for patients, according to a national report to be released Monday.

AURORA, Colo. - Dr. Tien Vu was fixing up a child's cut when the first victim was rolled into the emergency room. He was slumped in his wheelchair, his face gnarled in pain, his leg bloodied. A bullet had ripped into his thigh. Something's off, Vu recalled thinking. The emergency room at Children's Hospital Colorado, where Vu has worked for nearly a decade, mostly tends to kids' broken bones and stubborn fevers, though the staff has handled its share of ailing adults too. But a gunshot wound was unusual.

Children who are brought to a hospital's emergency department after a blow to the head are often rushed into a CT scanner so physicians can rule out dangerous bleeding in the brain. But when emergency doctors wait to see if a child's dizziness, nausea, headache or disorientation subside, they can reduce the use of potentially risky CT scans without raising the risk they will miss a problem requiring immediate surgery, says a new study . The research, published in the journal Pediatrics , comes against the backdrop of two trends: the rising rate of concussion-related ER visits by younger kids , and the exploding use of CT, or computed tomography , scans, despite growing concerns about the high dose of radiation and heightened cancer risk they pose.

The premise Nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) is having trouble managing her growing addiction to painkillers. Nevertheless, she continues to snort an opiate in the supply room and pop pills in the bathroom during shifts at the hospital. Jackie works in the busy emergency room, where she helps take care of a boy who wedged a dental mirror up his nose because he was trying to see his brain. Later, another young man is brought in after being found crushed under 2 tons of books (he and his father were part of a moving team that were clearing a library that was closing)

"Match Day" is a sort of March Madness for med students. It's the time of year when seniors in medical schools throughout the country are matched with residency programs. Though the fine points of the process likely only matter to those craving a spot, the residency offerings do offer a glimpse of our future specialists, if not our general practitioners. The not-for-profit National Resident Matching Program on Thursday placed more than 16,000 U.S. medical students in a record 26,000 residency programs.

Every year, some 300,000 Americans suffer a heart attack outside of a hospital, and the overall statistics are pretty grim: only 7.9% survive. So, what is it about the lucky 23,700 that helps them buck such long odds? One thing those survivors are likely to have in common is that their first heart attack symptoms seem to have come on in a public place. Another is that the heartbeat irregularity that signals trouble is likely to be ventricular fibrillation , a fast or erratic electrical signal in the heart's lower chambers that causes them to quiver uselessly rather than pumping blood out of the heart and into the rest of the body.

"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" 9 p.m. Dec. 1, NBC Episode: "Rescue" The Premise: Twenty-six-year-old Caitlin Lemarck throws a party at which she is attacked, and her head is smashed against a mirror. She has a seizure and is taken to the hospital, where she goes into cardiac arrest. The emergency room doctors aren't able to resuscitate her, and she dies of bleeding into her brain (a subdural hematoma). Upon examining Lemarck's body, Dr. Melinda Warner ( Tamara Tunie)

Apart from containing several errors, the report ignores some important facts. Firstly, the Department of Emergency Medicine provides attending staff coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The attending emergency physician is board certified with up to 15 years experience in resuscitation. Since this physician is ultimately responsible for all medical care delivered in the Emergency Department and is the most experienced physician on scene, he has to have the authority to determine the initial treatment of emergency cases.

Emergency medicine has caught the interest of the viewing public. Witness the high ratings of NBC's "ER," which soundly trounced CBS' medical offering, "Chicago Hope." It is not surprising, then, that CBS would send its biggest gun, Dan Rather, to try to strike a blow against the apparent NBC domination of this hot topic and the prime Thursday 10 p.m. time slot. Unfortunately, Dan and the "48 Hours" troupe were ill-prepared and there were casualties.

Apparently, suspicion of wanna-be doctors is higher than we thought. Last week, Booster Shots reported on a study that examined the degree to which candidates for ophthalmology residency programs fudged their resumes by exaggerating – or outright inventing – their role in medical research projects. It turned out that for one program in Little Rock, the rate of such “misrepresentations” (to put it generously) was 8.1%. Similar studies examining the truthfulness of applicants to residency programs in fields including radiation oncology, orthopedics, emergency medicine, pediatrics, radiology, psychiatry and neurology found misrepresentation rates ranging from 1.8% all the way up to 100%.

Re "Recession has some hospitals on the brink," Jan. 14 Never have emergency departments been more crucial than during this economic crisis, when people are losing jobs and insurance. Yet the American College of Emergency Physicians released a national report card on the state of emergency medicine in which California earned a D+ for its lack of support for emergency medicine and ranked last in the country in patients' access to emergency care. Policymakers at state and national levels must focus on making sure lifesaving care is available to everyone.