Treatments for rheumatoid arthritis improve. Funding from the National Institutes of Health rise and fall. Best practices evolve.

In rheumatology, however, it seems the only constant is change—that and the Annual Meeting’s “Clinical Pearls from the Recent Medical Literature” session. The analysis is a long-standing staple of the Scientific Assembly and always well attended.

Jerome Hoffman, MD, FACEP

“There is just so much out there, and people need help to process it all,” said co-presenter Jerome Hoffman, MD, FACEP, professor emeritus of medicine/emergency medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles. “We can’t all have the training or spend the time to be specialists at everything, and it’s asking a lot of in-the-trenches clinicians, who spend most of their career providing clinical care, also to be expert at critically reading and interpreting the massive amounts of new literature that we’re supposed to know.”

W. Richard Bukata, MD

That part is the job of Dr. Hoffman and his longtime co-presenter W. Richard Bukata, MD, editor of Emergency Medical Abstracts and a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The pair has led this session for as long as most can remember, and use the opportunity both to highlight the newest research and to “reflect upon the fact that what we do as emergency physicians is a privilege and an honor and a joy,” Dr. Hoffman said.

“I hope that our audience will not only learn new facts, or even new approaches to clinical problems,” he said, “but also that they’ll be encouraged to think critically and to be appropriately skeptical about received wisdom in medicine … as so much of it turns out to be wrong.”