PulmCrit (EMCrit)

Magnesium might be the darling ion of critical care.  It has an interesting array of therapeutic applications ranging from asthma to Torsade de Pointes to preeclampsia.  This pair of chapters discusses the evaluation of both hypomagnesemia and hypermagnesemia. IBCC chapter on hypomagnesemia is located here. IBCC chapter on hypermagnesemia is located here. The podcast & comments […]

How much fluid can safely be removed from a pleural effusion during a thoracentesis? Much has been written about this, but solid evidence remains elusive.

Septic shock is perhaps the defining illness of medical intensive care.  As such it is an enormously broad and controversial topic.  This chapter attempts to provide a unified and straight-forward approach.  However, every physicians has a different approach to septic shock, so it’s impossible to claim that this is the best approach. There will doubtless […]

Like so many things in critical care, angioedema is difficult to research since it is uncommon, heterogeneous, and emergent.  As such, we have relatively little high-quality evidence regarding this disease (and the high-quality evidence that we do have is largely restricted to pharma-sponsored trials of new and insanely expensive pharmaceuticals).  This chapter attempts to create […]

In 2015 I wrote this post on ACEi-induced angioedema.  I still think it was a pretty good post (particularly for 2015), but it’s become increasingly clear recently that the post was fundamentally flawed.  Let’s try to straighten this out.  old model of bradykinin-mediated angioedema This is a conceptual model of how bradykinin-mediated angioedema occurs.  Several […]