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The majority of patients who present to the Emergency Department with vertigo suffer from benign conditions. However, a few percent of these patients have life-threatening conditions, such as a cerebellar stroke. The HINTS clinical decision rule (Head-Impulse test, Nystagmus, Test-of-Skew) allows the physician to identify patients with an acute vestibular syndrome of central origin. HINTS…

Checklists make it easier to do the right thing in the emergency room. That’s the idea behind a website launched this month. It will contain proposals for checklists on what information should be obtained for the assessment of different conditions at the emergency department. All emergency personnel are invited to participate in this development project.

Although there are no evidence for routine rectal palpation in patients with acute abdomen, there are other cases in which rectal palpation should be performed.

A digital rectal examination (DRE) is standard practice in cases of acute abdomen in adult patients. We analyzed the evidence for this by a systematic literature search, and identified 16 relevant original studies. These studies showed that there is no evidence for a diagnostic value of DRE in adult patients with acute abdomen. We should…