Gut Check on Gastroenterology Archive

December 17th, 2009

Ulcer Bleeding: Tricks of the Trade!

One of the difficulties we face when performing urgent endoscopy on a patient with upper GI bleeding is to visualize the mucosa and the lesion when blood is still present in the stomach. IV erythromycin can help by evacuating blood from the stomach, but it has become increasingly scarce; we haven’t had any available at […]

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January 16th, 2009

Beware of Plavix: Your Next On-Call Nightmare

I love being a gastroenterologist, but I hate being on call. If I could avoid “call,” I probably would never even contemplate retiring. Alas, call may be about to get worse for gastroenterologists, especially in light of new evidence that could curtail the common use of PPIs to prevent GI bleeding in patients taking clopidogrel (Plavix). […]

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