Department Blog - January 2016

Ben Lawner, DO, MS, EMT-P, co-led the workshop titled “Electronic Dance Music, Designer Drugs & Teen Deaths” at the annual meeting of the National Association of EMS Physicians, held last week in San Diego. His co-presenters were Kathleen FitzGibbon, MD, a 2015 graduate of the University of Maryland School of Medicine (now an EM resident at Christiana Care Health System), Matt Levy, DO, MSc, NREMTP, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins and a leader in that department's Division of Special Operations, and Kevin Seaman, MD, Executive Director of the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems. The focus of the workshop was the current craze of teens ingesting designer drugs in an attempt to have psychedelic experiences at concerts. Some of those attempts have been fatal. The workshop leaders reviewed recent literature on the topic and discussed evidence-based practices for response and treatment.

Dr. Joe Martinez and Dr. Adam Geroff published a clinical image and patient vignette about Sister Mary Joseph’s nodule in the Visual Diagnosis column of the January issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine. Sister Mary Joseph (Julia) Dempsey, a surgical assistant at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, at the turn of the 19th century, brought this ominous indication of abdominal cancer to the attention of Dr. William Mayo, who published a paper about it in 1928. The eponym was first used, posthumously for Sister Mary Joseph, by Dr. Hamilton Bailey, in a book chapter published in 1949.

The February issue of Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America, on the topic of respiratory emergencies, contains articles written by two EM faculty members. Michael Winters, MD, with co-author Michael Allison, MD (a 2015 graduate of our 6-year EM/IM/CCM residency and now a critcal care attending at St. Agnes Hospital), contributed the article titled “Noninvasive Ventilation for the Emergency Physician.” Haney Mallemat, MD, co-authored the article titled “Emergency Department Treatment of the Mechanically Ventilated Patient.” Amal Mattu, MD, Consulting Editor for the Clinics series, provided the foreword for this issue.