Hyponatremia

Hyponatremia (low serum sodium) is one of the most common electrolyte disorders encountered in the ED. Most of the time this electrolyte disorder requires us to do less- not more. However, if the patient is critically ill from their hyponatremia then we need to know how to quickly intervene and even be a little creative if we don’t have the medications that we want. We’ll review how to do the right thing for these patients, track down the cause of hyponatremia, and make the right decisions so we don’t cause any harm.

Hyponatremia podcast

Hyponatremia Show Notes (Word Format)

Hyponatremia Show Notes (PDF)

Websites that I talked about:

EMchatter.com– A blog made by John Schonert, an EM PGY-3 from West Virginia.  His blog is a collection of the best in EM education.  Subscribe to the weekly updates to get short summaries of the best EM on the web for free.  Better yet- if you find something you like, submit your own link for consideration.

The short coat blog– Made by Lauren Westafer, an MS-4 interested in emergency medicine who is publishing some great stuff.  Medical students and residents will find useful reviews of the literature on common emergency medicine topics as she wades through them herself.  Don’t be fooled- she is writing well above her training level and the reviews from the ground up are really insightful- especially if you are new to emergency medicine.