Wednesday Workshop Recap: Handling Headaches

This week we kicked off DDQX Learning 's countdown of the Top 5 Chief Complaints with a case for the fifth most commonly seen chief complaint in U.S. emergency rooms... headache!

We've almost all experienced a headache at some point in our life, and there's an extremely high chance that you or someone you love is affected by a headache disorder—a neurological disorder marked by recurrent, debilitating headaches. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), headache disorders affected an estimated 40% of the global population, or 3.1 billion people, in 2021.

Physicians must be at the ready to manage these common complaints with empathy and compassion. Furthermore, it is vital for physicians to be able to differentiate these primary headaches from headaches due to other causes, a.k.a. secondary headaches, which may be a warning sign for a more serious underlying condition.

Summary

The meeting was led by Dr. Deason, the Founder & CEO of DDQX Learning, who emphasized the importance of skills and attitudes for long-term success in learning. He introduced the 5P Approach, which prioritizes, paraphrases, prognoses, picks, and conducts postmortems.

Dr. Deason encouraged students to think like a physician by forming then refining a differential diagnosis after each sentence, and triaging patients as green, yellow, or red.

He also discussed the mnemonic "VINDICATE" for forming a differential diagnosis and emphasized the importance of considering various possibilities when evaluating a patient.

Dr. Deason provided a detailed example of how to approach a patient case, highlighting the significance of age, gender, and precipitating factors in determining the severity of the patient's condition. He also led a discussion on how age and ground level fall impact the differential, emphasizing the likelihood of traumatic brain bleed with older age and greater impact.

Dr. Deason emphasized the importance of performing postmortems to refine clinical pattern recognition by preparing for future case iterations. The group's postmortem discussion included:

1. What other questions could have been asked while keeping the case details the same?
2. In what ways could the case be altered while retaining the same diagnosis?
3. In what ways could the case be altered to arrive at the other diagnoses on the differential?

Dr. Deason shared details about the company's upcoming live workshops and gamified approach to medical education. He emphasized the importance of developing clinical reasoning skills and invited participants to attend the free workshops, with a goal of reaching one hundred new students in the upcoming month.

Dr. Deason encouraged attendees to start implementing the method with a few cases a week to enhance their preparation for future questions. The presentation concluded with Dr. Deason expressing gratitude to the participants and inviting them to join the upcoming workshops or AMAs.