You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Commentary
Cranial burr holes in the emergency department: to drill or not to drill?
  1. Michael Abernethy
  1. Emergency Medicine, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA
  1. Correspondence to Dr Michael Abernethy, Emergency Medicine, University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA; ma2{at}medicine.wisc.edu

https://doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2019-209357

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Several years ago, I was working in a small community ED. A young man who had been stabbed in the right chest was dropped off in the ambulance bay. He was pale with a rapid and weak pulse. He then went unresponsive. I quickly performed a needle thoracostomy followed by a 32F chest drain evacuating approximately 400 mL of blood. There was an immediate improvement in his perfusion and overall condition. He was eventually transferred to the regional trauma centre and had an uneventful hospital stay.

    Later that same evening, a large (150 kg) middle aged man was brought in by ambulance …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Twitter @FLTDOC1

    • Contributors MA is the sole author of this commentary.

    • Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles