Edwin Boudreaux, PhD, is a Professor of Emergency Medicine, Psychiatry, and Quantitative Health Sciences and the Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.
This piece discusses the role that healthcare providers and organizations can play in suicide prevention, including identifying suicide risk in patients and responding effectively.
A man with a history of prior umbilical hernia repair presented to the emergency department (ED) with abdominal pain and was initially diagnosed with cholelithiasis before being discharged home. However, the next day he returned to another ED with similar symptoms and was diagnosed with a small bowel obstruction caused by adhesions from a ventral hernia. He underwent surgery but died three days later from multi-organ failure and sepsis caused by necrotic bowel and peritonitis. The commentary describes the appropriate evaluation for acute abdominal pain, the importance of imaging in patients with high-risk abdominal pain, and how to mitigate the influence of cognitive biases in the diagnostic process.
