Many of you reading this post will be familiar with the term FOAMed, which is an acronym for Free Open Access Meducation. (If it is new to you, find out more about this concept on these blog posts and articles - LITFL - FOAM / The Short Coat - What is FOAM? /  EMA - Free Open Access Medical education (FOAM) for the emergency physician). There are subsets of FOAMed, such as FOAMcc (critical care), FOAMped (paeds), FOAMlit (literature review and research) and FOAM4GP (general practice) which can be plugged into Twitter hashtags to follow those conversations and see what is topical.

This week I can across two different FOAMed items that have relevance to the motorsport medicine world, so I thought I'd highlight them here.

The first is great article by A/Prof Josh Farkas on his excellent Pulmonary Intensivist's Blog regarding the insidious dangers of Investigational Bias. The next time you find yourself wondering why the literature on a particular adopted but slight iffy intervention suddenly goes quite this article might offer some explanation:

The second is a video podcast (vodcast) from the SMACC Chicago conference featuring A/Prof Deborah Stein, from the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Centre. She talks about the REBOA (Resuscitation Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta), a device and procedure that is gaining increasing interest and in some areas has become a standard of care for non-compressible bleeding in trauma patients, despite an evidence base that consists largely of only case series and animal studies. It is something that, when combined with point of care ultrasound, becomes appealing for pre-hospital application. However, as Deborah presents, while there is a lot of potential gain from REBOA, there is also a lot yet that needs clarification before rushing in: