Hello, med students.

My name is Zach Olson, and thank you for downloading this week's episode of the EM Clerkship

Podcast.

Common topic this week.

This week, we are going to discuss the approach to the patient with diarrhea.

This is a very unique complaint in emergency medicine in that

diarrhea is usually not an emergency. I can pretty confidently say that it's a very low risk

complaint compared to some of the other stuff we see because it's statistically almost always

a viral illness.

No big deal.

Patients who are well appearing with less than 24 hours of non-bloody diarrhea as their chief

complaint and no other concerning symptoms don't overthink it.

Anti-diereals treat it with loparamide, which is amodium, or bismith, which is

peptobismal, or diphenoxylate, which is lomodal, and that's it, home. Just remember that there are

three big causes of non-viral diarrhea that you need to remember to, that you've learned about

in medical school, that even if they're uncommon, you have to at least consider.

They're the three icky eyes of diarrhea, eschemia, infections, and inflammatory bowel disease.

The three icky eyes. Eschemia, infections, inflammatory bowel disease. The three icky eyes. Aschemia infections,

inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's or ulcerative colitis. I'm going to overview the

treatment of these at the end, but first I'm going to give you just the five steps, the five

questions that you're going to be asking patients with diarrhea so that you don't

miss these. If you're diarrheaing patient answers, no, no, no, you're done. So your first question,

...