This is Steve Carroll, and you're listening to the Amb Basic Podcast.

This episode is part two for pulmonary ambulism, where we'll talk about treatment and disposition

of patients with PE. It's important that you properly restratify patients with PE and then treat them

appropriately. In this episode, we'll talk about how to properly classify P.E.s based on their size and

hemodynamic effects, how to treat them, and how to properly disposition the patient.

We'll talk about some newer P.E. literature that you need to be aware of because it's slowly

changing how we disposition our patients. As always, this podcast is represented the views of

Penning's Department of Defense, the U.S. Army,, or the Fort Hood Post Command. Before we talk about how to treat

PE, we have to talk about how to classify the size of the PE. Knowing how to properly

stratify patients with PE will help us figure out their treatment and disposition. The three

classifications of PE are massive, submassive,

and what I like to call non-massive. Non-massive is a term I've made up because I've never seen a term

for those small P.E. that are neither massive or submassive. One Australian doctor, Dr. Casey Parker

from the Broomdocs podcast, suggested that we call these small P.E.'s lung lint,

because they are sometimes so small that they don't cause any problems, and they may be so small

that they are a figment of the radiologist's imagination. Let's start with non-massive P.E.

These are mostly P.E.s that are sub-segmentalal in size with little or no derangements in the

patient's vital signs and without any signs of heart strain.

We'll talk about how to diagnose heart strain in a minute.

On the flip side, massive P.E.s are those patients with unstable vital signs, cardiac arrest,

or hypotension, even if that hypotension is transient.

In regards to hypotension, we're talking about a systolic blood pressure of less than 90.

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