Hello everyone. My name is Mike Estefan and I thank you for joining me today on this episode of the EM Clerkship podcast.

Today is going to be another deep dive, this time on the topic of trauma.

This episode is sponsored by Pearson Rabbit's Insurance.

Pearson Rabbit is an insurance agency that specializes in securing disability and life insurance

policies for physicians and other health care professionals. Zach and I both personally use

Pearson Rabbits for our insurance needs and would not be recommending their services if we did

not think they were anything but excellent. Even if you are not currently interested in their

services,

they have a really interesting blog on their website where they post articles directly related

to disability and life insurance for physicians. I recently discovered this blog and have learned so

much from just reading their posts. Did you know that self-prescribing medications can make

obtaining a disability insurance policy much more difficult to obtain?

I sure didn't. Check out this blog and the rest of what they have to offer at www.personravitz.com.

Now, back to our episode. Let's start by talking about advanced traumatic life support, or ATLS, for short.

ATLS is kind of like ACLS, but for trauma. I believe most, if not all, trauma centers in the United

States require their ED providers to be ATLS certified. It is a widely used algorithmic approach

to the resuscitation of trauma patients.

Every trauma resuscitation begins with what we call the primary survey. And after the primary

survey is complete, we move on to the secondary survey. Sometime after the secondary survey is complete,

a tertiary survey takes place.

Let's work through a hypothetical scenario.

Over the base command radio, you learn that EMS has activated a trauma alert for a severe motor vehicle collision with an ETA of two minutes.

...