Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine – THE PHARM dedicated to the memory of Dr John Hinds

SMACC has come and gone again for another year.  It’s always a bit of a comedown, returning to normality after the conference, and this year it is with greater sadness that we return to our ordinary lives.

Enough has been written, tweeted, and blogged about the death of Dr John Hinds just after the SMACC conference.  Nothing I can say will add to that, or make anyone feel any better, so rather than dwell on the loss and sadness, I will instead look back at the fun times I had at SMACC this year.

Please be warned, this is essentially the online version of my holiday photo slideshow.  It is image intensive, and catastrophically boring for everyone but me.  I shall therefore take delight in inflicting it on all of you…

This is part 2 of a series (part 1 is here) on trying to study near-infrared spectroscopy in the prehospital setting by Dr Andrew Weatherall (@AndyDW_). Can NIRS work? No one can be sure but here’s one approach to getting some data we can actually use. 

A while back I did a post where I pointed out that when you get sold technology, there’s a whole history behind the machine that goes beep that means it’s probably not what you’re told. And the example I used was near-infrared spectroscopy tissue oximetry.

That was partly because I’m involved in research on NIRS monitoring and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at it.  Like every time I look carefully in the mirror, there’s a lot of blemishes that I miss on a casual glance. I also don’t mind pointing out those blemishes.

So that post was about all the things that…