Gave this lecture yesterday. Needs some tweaking, it is a little long on ecg changes with hyperkalemia and the calcium section is light. I will add other electrolytes.
A Tale of Two Cathartics
How did I not know the story of the great cathartic wars of the 1990’s?
pic
Why you should subscribe to the Nephrol Mailing List
Because John Daugirdas answers questions about the Daugirdas equation. Awesome.
Also their is now a discussion going on about The Craziest Transplant Scenario Ever.
I know everyone’s inbox is overflowing but this is worthwhile one to subscribe to.
Social Media posed to disrupt medical education.
Read this post in the BMJ.
Now read this post by John Mandrola
When I grow up I want to be Dr. John Mandrola. Great blog post on the emerging preeminence of social media in medical education.
Perhaps the most notable facet of this new brand of knowledge transfer is its democracy. There are no paywalls; patients get access too. Let’s emphasize the value of patients learning alongside caregivers. This democracy of knowledge is vital.
My favorite part of the post was his answer to the question of quality of information:
An often cited challenge comes in the vetting of information. Skeptics of social media and the Internet have asked me how one knows the truth. Their bias, of course, is that prose written in peer-reviewed journals is accurate and free of conflict. That’s a laughable bias these days.
His link was a personal experience but he could just as easily linked to Retraction Watch to make the same point.
Make sure you follow his link to the global emergency medicine journal club. Impressive work. A great model for #NephJC to aspire to.
By the way NephJC.com is live, if not a bit rough.
#NephJC is coming
Next Tuesday will be the inaugural NephJC, a twitter journal club for nephrology. At 9pm Eastern there will be a twitter discussion on the article: Educational programs improve the preparation for dialysis and survival of patients with chronic kidney disease by Tamura et al. You can read about it here.
Tweet chats change the communication model of twitter. In the standard model of twitter interaction you see the tweets of the people you follow and your tweets are seen by the people who follow you. In a twitter chat you want to see all of the tweets surrounding a single hashtag, in this case #NephJC. This can be done by clicking on the hashtag, but this would require repeated clicks on the hashtag to keep it updated. Additionally you need to remember to addend each tweet with the same hashtag so other participants can see your comments.
 |
| Pressing the #icanhazpdf hashtag will find all of the tweets with that tag regardless if you follow the author. |
TweetChat is a web app that makes it easy get the up-to-the-minute tweet stream of a certain hashtag, it also filters out all of the other tweets from your timeline so you can focus on the discussion at hand.
Go to TweetChat.com and click Sign In the upper right corner.
Authorize TweetChat
Enter the hashtag NephJC and press GO
There is a custom tweet stream containing all the tweets across the twitterverse that are tagged #NephJC.
Additionally any tweet you enter in the tweet box will have #NephJC automatically added to it.
An alternative WebApp is TChat.io. Here is webcast on how to use it;
New Dietary Supplement Story: OxyElitePro
I learned about this at Forbes. But I guess I should have learned about it in the NEJM.
from this piece at Huffington Post
A popular diet supplement has caused an outbreak of severe liver disease, sickening nearly 100 people in 16 states since it was first reported in Hawaii last year, according to a new paper. The publication calls for a better system to remove dangerous supplements from the market.
Final score in the aegeline scare:
- 97 cases
- 47 hospitalizations
- 3 liver transplants
- and 1 death
And from the Department of This is Too Crazy to be Fiction:
I’m going to need to explore this paragraph in a few slides when I give my next talk:
And the agency has its work cut out for it: potentially dangerous supplements are widely available. More than 500 supplements have already been found to be adulterated with pharmaceuticals or pharmaceutical analogues, including new stimulants, novel anabolic steroids, unapproved antidepressants, banned weight-loss medications, and untested sildenafil analogues. In 2013 alone, researchers discovered two new stimulants in widely marketed supplements. My colleagues and I identified a new analogue of methamphetamine, N,α-diethyl-phenylethylamine (N,α-DEPEA), in a popular sports supplement. 3 FDA scientists discovered another stimulant, β-methylphenethylamine (β-MePEA) — a novel analogue of amphetamine — in nine supplements. 4 N,α-DEPEA and β-MePEA have never been studied in humans, and their adverse effects are entirely unknown; yet they are sold as “natural” products without having undergone any premarketing testing for safety. (Although supplements containing N,α-DEPEA were voluntarily withdrawn from the market, supplements containing β-MePEA remain widely available.)
Electrolyte Review
For my final lecture at Providence this academic year I did an ABG review covering all of the core concepts regarding the rapid interpretation ABGs and a touch on hyponatremia.
My two favorite slides were the slides that asked the residents to name the most likely diagnosis for a scenario with hyponatremia and various clinical settings:
Can you name all of them? I’ll post my answers in the comments.
Teachers earn more than doctors? No way!
This seems impossible but I don’t see any holes in the logic.
Source: BestMedicalDegrees.com
Passover is Here Again! Updated with a working link.
Newest version of my Passover Haggadot, now for iPad!
For the link to work you will first need to install iBooks.
Post by Cathy Topf.