Dr. Helman is an emergency physician at North York General Hospital in Toronto. He is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Division of Emergency Medicine, and the education innovation lead at the Schwartz/Reisman Emergency Medicine Institute. He is the founder and host of Emergency Medicine Cases podcast and website (www.emergencymedicinecases.com).
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One Response to “A Rational Approach to Pulmonary Embolism Evaluation”
April 14, 2019
Mark Baker, FACEP, FAMIAThanks for addressing an important topic. I liked the information about the landmark Canadian article. This is what Bayes theorem does. The likelihood of a test being a true positive or a false positive is based on the prior probability of the disease before the test was done. For example,a positive HIV test on a group of IV drug users sharing needles is likely to be a true positive. A positive HIV test on a group of patients with no risk factors at all is much less likely to be a true positive and more may be a false positive. So don’t throw darts at diagnoses… use tests wisely knowing the prior probability of the disease and how the test will change your management.