Rosen and Barkin's 5-Minute Emergency Medicine Consult continues to reflect the evolving nature of our clinical emergency medicine practices. Emergency medicine provides unique challenges to the clinician; the remarkable breadth of clinical conditions encountered, the time constraints of an acute illness, environmental considerations, and the logistical demands of busy emergency departments. Time is of the essence, and this resource is truly designed to meet the needs of clinicians working in settings providing urgent and emergent care. To look for a diagnosis, one must think of it, and the very nature of the emergency department (ED) makes prolonged deliberation difficult. Nevertheless, it must become instinctive to think about the statistically rare, but clinically serious entity, rather than to just reach for the statistically probable but nonlife-threatening diagnosis.

Rosen and Barkin's 5-Minute Emergency Medicine Consult provides concise formatted information allowing the busy clinician to respond to each patient appropriately. It is meant to be readily available in the ED, and frequently used in the trenches. Written and edited by practicing clinicians for their colleagues, the resource is designed to synthesize a mountain of information into tightly formatted chapters that stimulate analysis and subsequent assessment.

We have attempted to integrate our authors' expertise, experience, and knowledge base onto the pages of this resource. The chapters are not meant to be a diagnostic engine, but rather a place to confirm a diagnosis supported by clinical judgment and the subjective and objective evidence of a patient's presentation. Our authors attempt to provide a precise and clinically relevant summary useful in caring for the patient while also equipping students and residents with the structure needed to approach individual disease processes. We are indebted to our contributors for their commitment to this task.

The resource is intended to be accurate, focused, and readily integrated into practice, rather than being definitive and all encompassing. As in the past, this new edition incorporates new information and approaches to management, while allowing us to modify topics that reflect some of the new challenges we face.

Our goal is to make Rosen and Barkin's 5-Minute Emergency Medicine Consult useful to both novices in emergency medicine and experienced clinicians. The information and organization is designed to be easily used within the "chaos" that surrounds our clinical settings.

Clinical acumen, judgment, and experience are the foundations for our clinical practice. It is our hope that this resource will serve students, nurses, emergency medical personnel, residents, and practicing emergency physicians as a readily used resource in excellent patient care and knowledge acquisition.

Jeffrey J. Schaider

Roger M. Barkin

Stephen R. Hayden

Richard E. Wolfe

Adam Z. Barkin

Philip Shayne

Peter Rosen