Unsuspected killers in Emergency Medicine

Abstract

The essential challenge in the practice of emergency medicine is to rapidly diagnose and treat life-threatening conditions. Everything we teach in emergency medicine training programs is geared toward the rapid assessment of patients for these life threats. Unfortunately, not all deadly conditions in emergency medicine manifest classically or overtly. All too often, life threats are associated with atypical or insidious presentations, leading to delayed or misdiagnoses, increased morbidity and mortality, and litigation. This issue of the Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America focuses on some of the deadly diseases and conditions in emergency medicine that are commonly associated with misdiagnoses or delayed diagnoses—the ‘‘unsuspected killers’’ in emergency medicine. We have selected an assortment of topics spanning the full range of emergency conditions, both traumatic and nontraumatic, adult and pediatric. The authors have attempted to focus their reviews on aspects of each of these conditions that lead to misdiagnosis, whether it is through the lack of recognition of an uncommon condition (eg, myocarditis) or the atypical or insidious presentations of a common condition (eg, pulmonary embolism). We would like to thank the dedicated authors, each of whom contributed significant time to researching and writing the manuscripts. We would like to thank our colleagues, residents, and students for providing the inspiration behind this work. We would also like to thank Karen Sorensen and Elsevier Amal Mattu, MD Deepi Goyal, MD Andrew Ulrich, MD