The amazing team at @sciencevs.bsky.social dropped a #Tylenol podcast a few days ago, giving explanation of why the link has been made and how it's not quite as it seems A great example of bias and confounding, and how meta-analysis isn't always the pinnacle of evidence #EpiSky #MedSky

This has been a long time coming. However, there is a, bizarre lack of emphasis (as in 2016) on confirmation of venous placement, with plenty of words dedicated to tip positioning on CXR and only one reference to pressure transduction (seemingly as a preliminary check where the CXR will be (1/2)

Just a little too late for last week's #MedSkyDebate! Look forward to digging into this... Thanks to @medicluke.bsky.social for sharing it.

If you wanted to minimise risk of awareness, we could give our patients enough anaesthesia to be at near burst suppression, but then what would be the NNT and what harms would we cause from this?

If however you accept Pandit's definition of anaesthesia - "a chemically induced state which renders surgery acceptable to the patient" - then you can have awareness and even recall under anaesthesia provided those conditions are concurrently and subsequently acceptable to the patient.

Our practice of anaesthesia has been empirically derived over the last two centuries. We have yet to identify the neurophysiological basis of anaesthesia because we have yet to identify the neurophysiological basis of consciousness. So what we do is fundamentally a sophisticated guess.

Hey @chrimesy.com, we tried really hard to finally write a case report that doesn't massively misrepresent the PUMA guidance: how did we do? 🫣😜 (Congrats @jrobinson22.bsky.social on your first publication!) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

The Mallampati classification is considered by many to be a core part of airway assessment, but it has poor inter-rater reliability; this may in part stem from the myriad conflicting versions in textbooks and other resources. I'll start this #badmallampati thread with the OG descriptions:

I think this is the crucial thing. Drawing up emergency drugs isn't about the physical act of drawing up drugs. It's about cognitive load in a high-stress situations.

As an ethnic minority in the UK where there is a rise in right-wing populism, I'd like to stake my credentials as a citizen on the basis that when asked what emergency drugs I draw up for anaesthesia, rather than picking vasopressors or muscle relaxants, I said "tea".

I’m petrified about today’s science news. Genetically modifying crabs to have cheetah genes? This could go sideways fast.

The challenges of using ultrasound to measure the trachea: a brief report #pocus #airway ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Nice study confirming my prior beliefs about ketamine and its role in reducing post-op delirium. Unmeasured confounding always a possibility but pretty impressive efforts made to minimise this! TL;DR optimum intra-op ketamine dose to reduce delirium risk (compared to no ket) is 0.25-0.34mg/kg ABW.

OpenEvidence is generally very good, but it's occasionally horrifically wrong One place it falls down a lot is drug allergy (where it's often too conservative) There are NO absolute contraindications to acetylcysteine for acetaminophen OD Reported "allergy" = anaphylactoid rxns... (#1/3) #EMIMCC

White text on white background instructing LLMs to give positive reviews is apparently now common enough to show up in searches for boilerplate text.

Interesting study. Importantly, although the study only excluded obese patients with a BMI >60, they didn't actually recruit any patients with a BMI between 40 and 60. I suspect we can do better at individualising PEEP than simply BMI/3...

Another excellent reason not to use cricoid pressure (badly): the patient perspective.

A long overdue (but topical), nuanced and thorough discussion of "RSI" whose final conclusion I happen to entirely agree with. Well done @sthjournalclub.bsky.social

A normal CT head ≠ a low risk of raised ICP/herniation after LP in meningitis❗️ “80% of pts with ABM who herniate have no CT abnormalities” 🔑 Take-away: Clinical signs (e.g. GCS <9, seizures, pupil changes) are the best indicators of WHO SHOULD NOT have a LP journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

Great articles on lactate interpretation. I call lactate a "marker of badness" and even that most nebulous of definitions is only true-ish before you start treatment with things that might cause the lactate to go up, but still help the patient.

Assessing fluid responsiveness in spontaneously breathing MV patients is tough, so this work on SIGH35 by Messina et al. is really 👌 ▪️ Apply a 35cm H20 ‘sigh breath’ for 4 secs and measure the change in pulse pressure from baseline to nadir Simples. 1/ ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Anyway, here is something I wrote about p-values (ICYMI). statsepi.substack.com/p/no-you-can...

Great work from @iainmoppett.bsky.social and everyone else on the #AnSkyMedSkyDebate on whether TIVA is over-rated (it isn't 😅). I'm running away for family stuff for the rest of the weekend now though.

BREAKING: Prime minister announces govt will abolish @nhsenglandldn.bsky.social "I have absolutely no intention of wasting time with a big costly reorganisation" - @rthonwesstreeting.bsky.social told me in Dec 2023. Clearly the temptation - and perhaps his frustration proved too much

Out of 241 reported incidents of arterial trauma from CVC insertion, in 75 cases initial confirmatory checks (if any) failed to identify arterial cannulation. CXR most commonly implicated in this, with blood gas/transduction failing for mostly predictable reasons. What's your department's practice?

Flowchart of diagnosis, management and patient outcomes for central venous catheter-related arterial trauma incidents #AnSky #MedSky @intensiveperson.bsky.social https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.16570

Arterial trauma is a rare, but potentially life-threatening complication of central venous catheter insertion. In this interrogation of two national databases of incident reports, outcomes included: • stroke (10%) • death (4%) #AnSky #MedSky https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.16570

What device types were involved in central venous catheter-related arterial trauma incidents? #AnSky #MedSky @intensiveperson.bsky.social https://doi.org/10.1111/anae.16570