Pediatric Emergencies

Amardeep Singh, M.D.
Disclosures		The author has no relationships with commercial interests related to the content of the presentation.

Amardeep Singh, MD, is a board certified emergency room physician at Chicago's Mount Sinai Hospital. He states that the goal of his lecture is "to provide a systematic and methodological approach to (pediatric emergencies) so that caring for a child does not appear to be an alien phenomenon." With that in mind, he covers toxic ingestion by children, pediatric trauma, child abuse ... and several childhood diseases presenting in the ER.

Dr. Singh explains the causes and treatment of toxic ingestion by children and lists several vital signs such as hyperthermia, tachypnea, and bradypnia in pediatric emergencies. Treatment, and its occasionally attendant risks, may include gastric lavage and activated charcoal for toxic ingestion.

The author goes on to discuss pediatric trauma, its initial assessment, differential diagnosis, and treatment, and covers such traumas as head injury, cervical spine injury, thoracic injury, and abdominal injury in pediatric emergencies. He describes what he calls the "ominous signs" in status asthmaticus and the several treatment modalities for that condition, and covers croup, mengiococcemia, myocarditis, and status epilepticus and their diagnosis and treatment.

The lecture continues with a discussion of how to evaluate and treat the cyanotic neonate and the incidence and management of supraventricular tachycardia and of diabetic ketoacidosis in children. It concludes with the challenges to the physician in identifying and the mandated reporting of such possible manifestations of child abuse as brain injury, fractures, burns and bruises.