All is “Quiet” on the ER Front by Tim Erickson, M.D.

Ever walk into a morning ER shift and note an atypically serene atmosphere with a couple of polite patients occupying only two of your 40 ED beds? You’re first reaction is to utter a conversational prediction- “Hey, looks like we’re going to have a quiet shift today” As soon as the dreaded “Q” word leaves your lips, every heads turns towards you in the department-- nurses, clerks, residents, consultants, housekeeping, phlebotomy, and radiology techs all glare at you as if you just completely jinxed the entire shift. For within minutes, half the population of the northern hemisphere is suddenly going to attack your ED like a critically ill swat team equipped with hot oil and battering rams...by Tim Erickson, M.D.

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I Volunteer To Be On The Emergency Medicine Death Panel! by William Mallon, M.D.

Funny how something deemed so dangerous, and so preposterous by the politics of our day, seems to me to be exactly what is needed in health care reformand especially in Emergency Medicine. On a specialty by specialty basis, we need to identify what is futile care and decisions need to be made about what “we” as a society are going to pay for with “our” taxes. I am not talking about tense and complicated ethical issues that would tie up a panel of experts. I am talking about easy “stuff” we (in EM) can agree on (or “stuff” that science says does not work 99.9% of the time but is still being done)...by William Mallon, M.D.

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