Metabolic alkalosis and hypokalemia go together like Phineas and Ferb

This is one of my favorite lectures. It starts with Izzy getting fired on Grey’s Anatomy to the metabolic consequences of crack cocaine in dialysis patients to the imaginary monogenic diseases of Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington. Metabolic alkalosis is a topic that is rarely taught at all. This lecture goes deep tying metabolic alkalosis to potassium handling (as does the kidney). The lecture covers a lot of useful kidney physiology. In addition to metabolic alkalosis it covers some of the salt wasting nephropathies and monogenic causes of hypertension.

Keynote | PDF

Robot price war hits the Fluid and Electrolyte Companion

I remember this story entertaining story from 2011 (or maybe it was is a more recent version of the same events, it’s hard for me to believe I remember anything from 2011):

(CNN) -- Lots of normal people would pay $23 for a book.
But $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) for a scientific book about flies!?
This unthinkable sticker price for "The Making of a Fly" on Amazon.com was spotted on April 18 by Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger.
The market-blind book listing was not the result of uncontrollable demand for Peter Lawrence's "classic work in developmental biology," Eisen writes.
Instead, it appears it was sparked by a robot price war.

Well, take a look at the listing of The Fluid and Electrolyte Companion at Amazon.com today:

Come and step right up and purchase your very own copy of the Fluid and Electrolyte Companion! A bargain at $1,227.31. Don’t cheap out and but a used copy at only $834.75, go all the way and get a new one. Don’t delay there is only one left!

Or you could just download the PDF for free. Your choice.

This means we’re going to need to do another printing. Doesn’t it?

Lecture on hyperosmolar hypotonic hyponatremia

This is a formal lecture on the Tweetorial I posted about a patient with beer drinkers potomania but presented with increased serum osmolality due to ethanol intoxication.


KeynotePowerPointPDF

Note: The presentations are designed to be displayed in KeyNote, the powerpoint version may be weird, especially the animations, and some of the icons maybe jaggy.

Following the lecture Scott and I recorded an episode of the EMCrit podcast, episode number 242! Scott Weingart is a medical education revolutionary. If you are interested in learning about him check out this episode of Explore the Space.

My work is done here…

https://twitter.com/PDX_Tom/status/1102394278049853445

A couple of new Tweetorials

The first was in response to Robert Centor’s excellent description of how he uses reciprocal creatinine. Honestly I had not thought about reciprocal creatinine in a long time. It was fun diving into some of the literature around it. Here is the tweetorial:

Today I did a second tweetorial on hyperosmotic hyponatremia

Here I had some technical problems. I wrote the entire tweetorial using chained tweets in Safari on MacOS. When I went to upload all tweets, Twitter hung and failed to upload more than the first 8. I had to then go through and re-post the remainder of the tweetorial. I was frustrated and failed to attach two of the animated gifs I made. I added them as additional tweets but they break the flow. Tweetorials are like writing email newsletters, once you publish the tweets (or hit send on the newsletter) there is no opportunity for editing.

Good bye Bill.

Bill Peckham rafting the Colorado River while on dialysis. (PRNewsFoto/Northwest Kidney Centers)

Bill Peckam has passed. Bill was a long time dialysis patient (29 years) who was a public patient.He wrote the incredibly popular Sharp End of the Needle blog (when I did a review of nephrology blogs in 2013, I declared Sharp End to be the third nephrology related blog ever). It looks like he stopped posting to the blog this past June and his last Tweet was in November.

My favorite memory of Bill was reading his blog about rafting down the Snake River doing NX Stage at night. People talk about how home hemo allows you to really live your life. Bill was the embodiment of this. He also was a tremendous advocate for dialysis patients.

The NSMC internship, in the medical literature

In 2014, I feeling drained from getting NephJC off the ground, working on NephMadness, and setting up DreamRCT. I thought, what I really need is an intern to help me get my work done. That was the inspiration for the NSMC social media internship. That December we opened applications for the first class of interns.

Every year since then the class has grown and the curriculum has gotten more sophisticated.

Number of interns in each of the first 5 years of the NSMC Social Media Internship

The irony is that I was looking for help with my projects and instead built a monstrosity. I have built a monster project. I think what I need now is an intern to help with the internship.

Kidding aside, The NSMC internship has been an amazing journey and it has been uniquely rewarding to see our graduates take leadership positions in nephrology.

Silvi, NSMC class of 2016, and I recently published a summary of the NSMC Social Media Internship in CJASN.

The article is open access, so take a look. Additionally feel free to check out the NSMC class of 2019 that was just announced moments ago.