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Welcome to EMresource.ORG. (NOTE: ERpocketbooks.com has now become EMresource.org in order to reflect our added content).  In addition to pocketbooks from various authors, we now boast many additional products and free educational content aimed primarily at emergency medicine and urgent care practitioners, but with something for everyone.  Use the menu on the left or the hotlinks below to browse the site.

• Emergency Medicine Ultrasound Library
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• Radiation Exposure in Diagnostic Imaging
• Pocket Medical References and other products
• Other Emergency Medicine Products
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Quick Essentials Emergency Medicine

The same as the purple book, but a yellow app

$16.99

Click Here

Think Twice: More Lessons from the ER came out today as an app for the iPhone.  Thanks to a partnership with Harvey Castro, MD and Deep Pocket Series, LLC this app will be available at the introductory price of $2.99, which is more than half off the regular price of $6.99 and the print price of $7.50.  In the world of iPhone apps, visibility and the degree of ongoing success is highly dependent on getting into the “Top 100″ for your category (ours is Medicine) early on, so please consider purchasing a copy this week and please forward this email to anyone you know who has an iPhone.  To purchase, click the title above or CLICK HERE

“Easily as entertaining as The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Survival Handbook, but a hundred times more relevant – and it’s not rocket science.”–David Kirshman, Rocket Scientist

“A great mix of preventive medicine, humor and wit.  Full of the type of common sense which is unfortunately not common policy.”–Mark Hanson, Policy Researcher

“How many other $5 gifts can prevent injuries and save lives?!  A great gift for any household.  Full of sound advice that is easy to follow and well written”–Ayn Carrillo, Writer

“The ‘Darwin Awards‘ of the Emergency Department.” — Donna Bellard-Brendt, ER Nurse

“An ‘Information Vaccination’ that protects the reader from preventable emergencies. Probably more useful and definitely more enjoyable than a Tetanus shot.”– Alex Thayer, MD

“The author’s knowledge and sense of humor show throughout the book. It should be read by anyone who’d like to improve the health of their family and themselves.” — Susan, ER volunteer

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Safety Lessons from the ER

These inexpensive books are full of lessons that could save you hours of your time, thousands of dollars in medical bills, and what is more important, your health.

Everyone should read this book – twice.

***	Think Twice (paperback) $7.50 More lessons, more bad ideas, more learning from the mistakes of others, more ways to stay alive and to stay out of the ER. Serious yet humorous, this is a book people will actually read.  Begins where “Don’t Try This at Home” leaves off:  the information inside could save your life.

There are plenty of advantages to making sure that you always have emergency medical knowledge available at your fingertips. Here are just a few reasons why being clued up can often prove to be extremely beneficial.

Understanding medical conditions and treatments can often mean that you can avoid making unnecessary and costly trips to the emergency room. Being educated on a wide range of medical topics can mean that you able to self-diagnose, and event treat, a variety of conditions which you might find yourself experiencing. If you are keen to keep claims on your Aviva health insurance, or other such policies, to a minimum, then this can often be a low-cost alternative. You can also gain a better understanding of how live healthily, and avoid a number of complaints altogether.

Of course, there are a number of situations in which you may still be required to seek guidance from a medical professional. However, this not to say that your own knowledge will be rendered insignificant. On the contrary, a better understanding of any diagnosis which you do receive from a physician will usually serve to benefit you as a patient. Understanding the cause of your complaint can also help to ensure that it is prevented, or at least avoided, in future.

Pocketbooks and iPhone apps have the added advantage of being portable, and usually close to hand. This can allow you access detailed medical information, wherever you might be based. Although many companies, businesses and other such organisations or events often have a designated medical advisor, there is always the chance that you, or a family member, will find themselves in a situation where such services are not available. Therefore, being able to research a variety of medical scenarios can often prove essential.

We all know medical research can be biased, especially when it is funded by a company that is selling something, but conflicts of interests are caused by more than just financial greed.  There are many other factors influence the so called “results” that medical research produces and brings to our attention.  One huge one is due to the need to “publish or perish” faced by many academicians.  For a healthy dose of skepticism read the article at the link below.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/1/

Emergency departments are distilleries that boil complex blends of trauma, stress and emotion down to the essence of immediacy: What needs to be done, right now, to fix the problem. Working the past 20 years in such environments has shown me with great clarity what is wrong (and right) with our nation’s medical system.

It’s obvious to me that despite all the furor and rancor, what is being debated in Washington currently is not health-care reform. It’s only health-care insurance reform. It addresses the undeniably important issues of who is going to pay and how, but completely misses the point of why.

Health care costs too much in our country because we deliver too much health care. We deliver too much because we demand too much. And we demand it for all the wrong reasons. We’re turning into a nation of anxious wimps.

I still love my job; very few things are as emotionally rewarding as relieving true pain and suffering, sharing compassionate care and actually saving lives. Illness and injury will always require the best efforts our medical system can provide. But emergency departments nationwide are being overwhelmed by the non-emergent, and doctors in general are asked to treat what doesn’t need treatment.

In a single night I had patients come in to our emergency department, most brought by ambulance, for the following complaints: I smoked marijuana and got dizzy; I got stung by a bee and it hurts; I got drunk and have a hangover; I sat out in the sun and got sunburn; I ate Mexican food and threw up; I picked my nose and it bled, but now it stopped; I just had sex and want to know if I’m pregnant.

Since all my colleagues and I have worked our shifts while suffering from worse symptoms than these (well, not the marijuana, I hope), we have understandably lost some of our natural empathy for such patients. When working with a cold, flu or headache, I often feel I am like one of those cute little animal signs in amusement parks that say “you must be taller than me to ride this ride” only mine should read “you must be sicker than me to come to our emergency department.” You’d be surprised how many patients wouldn’t qualify.

At a time when we have an unprecedented obsession with health (Dr. Oz, “The Doctors,” Oprah and a host of daytime talk shows make the smallest issues seem like apocalyptic pandemics) we have substandard national wellness. This is largely because the media focuses on the exotic and the sensational and ignores the mundane.

Our society has warped our perception of true risk. We are taught to fear vaccinations, mold, shark attacks, airplanes and breast implants when we really should worry about smoking, drug abuse, obesity, cars and basic hygiene. If you go by pharmaceutical advertisement budgets, our most critical health needs are to have sex and fall asleep.

Somehow we have developed an expectation that our health should always be perfect, and if it isn’t, there should be a pill to fix it. With every ache and sniffle we run to the doctor or purchase useless quackery such as the dietary supplement Airborne or homeopathic cures (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year). We demand unnecessary diagnostic testing, narcotics for bruises and sprains, antibiotics for our viruses. And due to time constraints on physicians, fear of lawsuits and the pressure to keep patients satisfied, we usually get them.

Yet the great secret of medicine is that almost everything we see will get better (or worse) no matter how we treat it. Usually better.

The human body is exquisitely talented at healing. If bodies didn’t heal by themselves, we’d be up the creek. Even in an intensive care unit, with our most advanced techniques applied, all we’re really doing is optimizing the conditions under which natural healing can occur. We give oxygen and fluids in the right proportions, raise or lower the blood pressure as needed and allow the natural healing mechanisms time to do their work. It’s as if you could put your car in the service garage, make sure you give it plenty of gas, oil and brake fluid and that transmission should fix itself in no time.

The bottom line is that most conditions are self-limited. This doesn’t mesh well with our immediate-gratification, instant-action society. But usually that bronchitis or back ache or poison ivy or stomach flu just needs time to get better. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning wasn’t your doctor being lazy in the middle of the night; it was sound medical practice. As a wise pediatrician colleague of mine once told me, “Our best medicines are Tincture of Time and Elixir of Neglect.” Taking drugs for things that go away on their own is rarely helpful and often harmful.

We’ve become a nation of hypochondriacs. Every sneeze is swine flu, every headache a tumor. And at great expense, we deliver fantastically prompt, thorough and largely unnecessary care.

There is tremendous financial pressure on physicians to keep patients happy. But unlike business, in medicine the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes a doctor needs to show tough love and deny patients the quick fix.

A good physician needs to have the guts to stand up to people and tell them that their baby gets ear infections because they smoke cigarettes. That it’s time to admit they are alcoholics. That they need to suck it up and deal with discomfort because narcotics will just make everything worse. That what’s really wrong with them is that they are just too damned fat. Unfortunately, this type of advice rarely leads to high patient satisfaction scores.

Modern medicine is a blessing which improves all our lives. But until we start educating the general populace about what really affects health and what a doctor is capable (and more importantly, incapable) of fixing, we will continue to waste a large portion of our health-care dollar on treatments which just don’t make any difference.

Posted with permission, Tom Doyle, MD (tomdoy@aol.com)