There’s quantity and there’s quality. The social media coming out of #ACEP15 has both. We surpassed the 10,000-tweet barrier before noon of Day 2, but what strikes me is the quality of these tweets. More high-quality images and high-yield slides are going viral. There are tweets with links to PubMed-indexed papers that form the basis of today’s cutting-edge talks. This is the kind of Free Open Access Medical Education (#FOAMed) that the world of emergency medicine demands from us, and that is what we are giving them!

Dr. Nick Genes (@borborygmi) covered a friendly debate between Dr. Judith Tintinalli and Dr. Scott Weingart (@emcrit) on the pros and cons of physical books, the process of quality review that goes into FOAM versus textbooks, and how people learn.

One upside of FOAM is that it is self-policing—@emcrit’s audience gives him contemporaneous peer review. That’s fine when you get more than 200,000 downloads per month, as Dr. Weingart’s Emcrit Podcast does. But that may not be generalizable. Meanwhile, everything in Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine is peer-reviewed, but mistakes take a long time to be corrected. This topic won’t be put to rest any time soon, but it’s fun to see the top minds duke it out!

Dr. Billy Mallon’s lecture “Trauma Tea Party: Debunking Trauma Myths” was brilliantly covered by Dr. Manrique Umana (@umanamd) and Dr. Allen Roberts (@GruntDoc). But Dr. Todd Taylor (@toddtaylr), while less prolific, summed up one popular pearl—“We should not be doing needle [decompression] for trauma at the 2nd intercostal space…rather go to 5th intercostal space, mid-axillary line.”  Another myth debunked: “All TAR [traumautic aortic ruptures] go to heaven.” Dr. Alejandro Moya (@alemoyaal) tweeted one of Dr. Mallon’s slides showing that, no, not all of these patients die in the era of grafts and stents.

Hungry for more myth-busting? How about the myth that the zero pain is a safe goal? It’s no longer news that emergency physicians can have a positive or negative impact on patients depending on whether or not (or how much) we prescribe opioids and opiates.

The session “Dying to be Pain Free: The US Opioid Drug Death Epidemic” generated a lot of buzz. Dr. Sandy Simons (@ergoddessMD) tweeted that “About 17 pills is the average quantity of an ER opioid prescription.” Dr. Peter Chai (@PeterRChai) wrote that “curbing the opioid epidemic starts with talking to your patient about the danger of opioids.” It might take longer, but it might be worth it.