Emergency medicine physicians routinely deal with cardiac emergencies in adult patients but rarely encounter infants with critical cardiac conditions. While the infant's cardiac physiology can be very different from an adult's, the general principles of preload, afterload, contractility, and vascular resistance are the same.
The Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) course for doctors was introduced in Nebraska in 1978 and given nationally for the first time in 1980 by the American College of Surgeons. The goal of ATLS is to serve as a safe and reliable method for managing patients with traumatic injury and provide a "common baseline for the continued innovation and challenge of existing paradigms in trauma care."
What do parents do when their child is out of control? Often, they all end up in the ED. The child is sullen and defiant, occasionally agitated. The parents are frustrated and often at the end of their rope. So, as the emergency physician on duty, how do you evaluate this situation?
Entrapments and retained foreign bodies represent a common cause of emergency department (ED) visits. A majority of these pediatric presentations are easily assessed and managed by emergency physicians. However, even when accurately identified, this injury pattern may present therapeutic challenges.
