Last month I had the privilege of doing a short podcast talk on Pitfalls on Low Back Pain. Dr. Amal Mattu (Univ of Maryland) hosts these monthly EM Casts on Emedhome.com (where DOES he find the time?!) and was in town lecturing at our department's High Risk EM Conference. He tours the country giving lectures and, while at the conferences, he interviews lecturers about what they just spoke about. I wish I had thought of this idea. Pure genius.If you know Amal, you know that he has this unique ability to put you at ease and make you feel like he's your best friend just having a chat over coffee. So, when we did our podcast, it was pretty casual and we were joking around. Little did I know that the rest of his podcasts have a more serious tone. Thanks a lot, Amal.
The podcast just got published online this week. Fortunately by the power of editing, I sounded borderline competent. For instance, I started by talking about the basics. There are 4 "red flags" of back pain: fractures, cauda equina syndrome, spinal infection, and vertebral malignancies. For the life of me, I couldn't remember "vertebral malignancies" during the recording session. We spent a good 5 minutes just laughing at the fact that I couldn't remember it. It was a TIA moment, especially considering I had just given a one-hour lecture on this just about 10 minutes ago. I started and restarted several times with lots of flustered stuttering, before I just decided that I would change the national guidelines such that there are now THREE red flags of back pain, according to me. Fortunately that got edited out. You'll notice in the podcast snippet below that there's this awkward, pregnant pause after listing the first 3 conditions and then "malignancies" gets edited in. Nice, Amal. Nice.