The First10EM monthly wrap up is a place for me to share updates about the website, about my academic life, and also interesting content, such as books, podcasts, and other FOAMed, that I have encountered in the prior month. Obviously the format means the focus is mostly on content I have found, but I hope the community gets engaged in the comments, sharing books, podcasts, FOAMed, or anything else that you think would benefit or delight the broader emergency medicine community.
First10EM was determined to be “possibly credible” by some citation software, which is perhaps the best thing ever said about me. Possibly credible is a great tagline for the website, and really everything I do.
I will be taking a partial vacation from FOAMed over the summer, so expect the number of publications and videos to drop off for the Northern Hemisphere summer. However, I will be back to my crazy schedule again once the nice weather passes here in Canada.
There are just 2 new YouTube videos this month:
NG tubes should NOT be used in bowel obstruction (an evidence review):
Huge practice change: BiPAP for preoxygenation (The PREOXI trial):
A substitute teacher inheriting a Spectre-esqe super-villain organisation, completely with super intelligent cats? What’s not to like? Starter Villain by John Scalzi was a light read, but very entertaining.
I didn’t realise it was the same author, but after reading Starter Villain, I noticed that many other John Scalzi books had been recommended to me in the past, and so the name will likely show up a lot in the near future. I followed up Starter Villain by reading all three books of the Interdependency Trilogy: The Collapsing Empire, The Consuming Fire, and The Last Emperox. I would call these easy reading soft science fiction, which often isn’t my favourite, but these are well written and great for relaxing post-shift books.
This sat on my shelf for ages, but I am glad I finally got around to reading Daniel Dennett’s “Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking”. It is a very easy read, which is saying a lot given the incredible depth of complex philosophy being tackled. I will probably have to reread this a few times to absorb even half of the content.
There are only 2 episodes so far, but I expect the new channel “HotTown” which dives into various topics to answer the question, ‘how do we know that’, is quickly going to become one of my favourites. The first episode was “how do we know dogs are colour blind?” The second, “how do we know how many people died from COVID” is also excellent.
I found this episode of the unexplainable on the difficulties of measuring the height of Mount Everest interesting. If we can’t even settle the simplest things, is it any wonder evidence based medicine is so complicated?
I am not sure why I enjoyed this so much, but that fact that he has been working on it for more than a decade might be part. This smarter everyday slowmo macro footage of the cicada sound making apparatus was very cool.
I often like waiting for other content to come out before putting my own opinion out there, because I learn so much from the other FOAMed experts, and as carefully as I try to read papers (including combining the trial registries and supplements), there are often details that I miss. I didn’t do that with PREOXI, publishing my take simultaneously with the publication of teh trial, but there is a ton to be learned from listening / reading all the various takes on this study:
“He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived.”
“Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.” – Mario Quintana
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” – Mark Twain
