Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D A Jerrard.
Although the diving community attempts to train and educate its members with regard to the dangers of the deep, there are still a significant number of individuals each year who need treatment for painful and life-threatening illness incurred as a result of the dive. The emergency physician needs to identify these individuals quickly, stabilize them, and refer and transport as soon as possible to a recompression chamber.
Whether in the prehospital setting or in the Emergency Department, the emergency physician is usually the first care-giver to the burned elderly patient. Though the predominance of care over the long-term is by burn specialists, attention to the details of resuscitation and stabilization by the emergency physician in the initial stages has a vital role in the overall scheme of care.
Since the late 1970s, in an effort to quench the ever burgeoning appetite for pharmacological substances of abuse and to satiate their own need for profit, unscrupulous chemists have set up clandestine laboratories to produce and market new drugs for street sale. Using fairly common industrial chemicals, they have altered or modified preexisting controlled substances such as fentanyl, meperidine, mescaline, amphetamine, and phencyclidine, producing derivatives of these parent compounds that, up until 1986, were able to temporarily elude the guidelines of the Federal Controlled Substances Act due to their new and unique chemical structures. Unsuspecting users continue to use the drugs recreationally. This article will present a comprehensive review of these "Designer Drugs" looking at historical data, pharmacokinetics, treatment, abuse trends, and some of the more recent additions to the social pharmacopoeia.