Hello, digital friends!

Welcome to Brushing Up! Back when I was a medical education fellow, I toyed with the idea of starting a blog and wrote a few posts for the Stanford/Kaiser EM residents on the unofficial resident website. Whenever I took care of a patient with an interesting, challenging, or rare problem, I went home and brushed up on the topic - book in one hand, blog editor in the other. It helped fulfill my desire to stay sharp while providing a quick and easy learning opportunity for any interested readers.

Since moving on to a community clinical setting, I miss having residents and students around to share my stories with. But the great cases keep on coming!

There is no theme to this blog. There is no curriculum. But, in the spirit of academics, I prepared some goals and objectives:

Goal

Regularly brush up on various emergency medicine topics based on real patient cases

Objectives

Upon reading each blog post, learners should be able to:

1. Recall up to 3 presenting signs/symptoms for the disorder

2. Name up to 3 "brush-up" pearls related to the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder

3. Analyze up to 3 "what if" scenarios to think through potential complications for the disorder

Like many blogs, Brushing Up is primarily a passive learning tool (and hence the objectives mainly target the "knowledge" category of Bloom's Taxonomy). BUT, we all know that active learning has more staying power. So, send me your cases. Give me feedback on my posts. TEACH ME. I'm open to anything, really.

The only disclosure I can think of is that there will likely be a disproportionate amount of toxicology topics. It's what I love reading/learning/nerding out about (as much as a non-toxicologist can). That's it. I have no financial or administrative incentives to publish this blog. This is just a place to reflect on what I've learned. I hope you enjoy your time here.

Questions? Thoughts? Contact me!

Kristin

kristin.fontes@gmail.com

@kfontes