Topic
Internal medicine
How physicians reason through diagnosis and common conditions, explained at the level of evidence and mechanism.
This page collects every article by Dr. Damon Tojjar in this topic. For all topics see browse by topic, and for the source-anchored record see damontojjar.com/record.
Articles in this topic (12)
- Balanced Fluids Versus Saline: What the Big Trials Show
The largest randomized trials comparing balanced crystalloids with 0.9% saline show, at most, a small kidney and survival advantage for balanced fluids, and the two...
- How Acute Kidney Injury Is Staged, and Why It Is Not the Same as CKD
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is staged one to three by how far a person's serum creatinine rises above their own baseline and how long their urine output stays low,...
- How Delirium Is Detected With the Confusion Assessment Method
The Confusion Assessment Method, or CAM, detects delirium by converting a formal psychiatric definition into four observable features that a trained clinician can...
- How Early Warning Scores Like NEWS2 Flag Deterioration
Aggregate early warning scores like the National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) work by turning a handful of routine vital signs into a single number that rises as a...
- How Frailty Is Measured: Phenotype Versus Deficit Index
Frailty is measured two dominant ways, and they begin from different questions. The physical phenotype, defined by Linda Fried and colleagues in 2001, treats...
- How Pneumonia Severity Scores Help Decide Who Needs the Hospital
When a person arrives with pneumonia, the first question is not which antibiotic but where care should happen: home, a hospital ward, or the intensive care unit....
- How Syncope Risk Scores Are Built and Validated
A syncope risk score is built by following a large group of emergency-department patients, recording candidate predictors at the index visit, then using regression...
- How VTE Prophylaxis Decisions Are Risk Stratified in the Hospital
Venous thromboembolism prophylaxis in the hospital is a decision about two competing harms, not one. Clinicians estimate how likely a medical inpatient is to form a...
- The Diagnostic Logic Behind a Low Sodium
A low serum sodium is a problem of water balance, not salt intake, and the guideline logic reflects that. The 2014 European clinical practice guideline on...
- The Evidence Behind Giving Less Blood, Not More
For most hospitalized adults who are stable and not bleeding uncontrollably, holding red cell transfusion until hemoglobin falls below 7 grams per deciliter is as...
- What the REVISE Trial Changed About Stress Ulcer Prophylaxis
The REVISE trial, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2024, randomly assigned more than 4,800 invasively ventilated intensive care unit adults to...
- What the Evidence Actually Shows for the Sepsis Hour-1 Bundle
The evidence behind a mandated one-hour antibiotic deadline in sepsis is considerably softer than the mandate itself suggests. A large body of observational data...