Jerome Hoffman, MD, FACEP, and W. Richard Bukata, MD, have been giving the annual literature update at ACEP for some 25 years. And every year, skepticism runs as rampant as optimism.

“What we try to accomplish is two-fold,” said Dr. Hoffman, emeritus professor of medicine/emergency medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles. “First is to highlight what’s new or possibly practice-changing in the literature of the past year. At least as important, we also try to evaluate these papers critically and put them into a broader perspective, so people don’t believe that something must be true simply because it’s been published.”

Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Bukata, executive editor of Emergency Medical Abstracts and clinical professor of emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will jointly present “Clinical Pearls From the Recent Medical Literature 2018: Parts 1 and 2.”

The idea is to highlight dozens of papers that are germane to emergency physicians, while simultaneously teaching them to think critically about how the research was gathered and whether it is credible.

“We do want to spotlight new information that should perhaps change our practice. But we also hope listeners will learn why critical appraisal of the literature is so necessary, so that they can be appropriately skeptical about all the hype they hear … which so often proves to be unjustified,” Dr. Hoffman said. “Any one article may be valuable by itself.  But as part of a larger whole, we are highlighting the importance of thinking critically and being skeptical.”