S A E M
Newsletter of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine November/December 2004 Volume XVI, Number 6
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE The Physician as Scientist: Thoughts from a Skeptic (and a Believer)
901 N. Washington Ave. Lansing, MI 48906-5137 (517) 485-5484 saem@saem.org www.saem.org
The SAEM Research Fund – Helping to Build Academic Careers Brian J. Zink, MD University of Michigan Chair, SAEM Development Committee
Our academic practice environment has grown increasingly challenging from a cognitive, affective and physical standpoint. At a time Carey Chisholm, MD when we seem to need to be all things to all people—being empathetic physicians practicing customer friendly care to all comers at all times and frugally using resources at a zero-error tolerance rate while supervising and teaching residents and students—why would I advocate that we remember our role as scientists as well? Because our specialty's future depends on your efforts within the academic community. It is here that the science of discovery (without which we cannot progress), the science of application (without which new discoveries are meaningless to society) and the science of education (without which we have no future) are practiced. Looking back over my relatively brief 24 year career in Emergency Medicine, there are numerous examples of how each of these "sciences" have profoundly changed the way we practice Emergency Medicine as a specialty. Examples are easy to find. ● Nasotracheal intubation has been replaced by RSI techniques. ● "Brutane"and “bite the bulletol” have been replaced by procedural sedation and analgesia. ● Sensitive bedside pregnancy testing and ultrasonagraphy have taken much of the guesswork away from diagnosing ectopic pregnancies. (Does anyone remember the culdocentesis?) Medicine can be characterized as the art of caring layered on the foundation of science. It cannot exist without attention to both. Neither caring nor science is alone successful in healthcare when practiced in isolation. In Carl Sagan's book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he writes about the unique combination of a globalized society dependent upon science and technology existing within systems that increasingly do not understand basic scientific principles. He notes this to be a "prescription for disaster". In the chapter "The fine art of baloney detection," Sagan describes the need for us to be skeptics (as opposed to cynics, who have predetermined and negative beliefs undeterred by further data) in our role as scientists. The scientif-
In the few short years since it was founded, the SAEM Research Fund has had a remarkably positive impact on the academic careers of scores of young emergency physicians. These physicians are working hard in research and education toward the end result that all of us strive for – improved care for our emergency patients. The comments of our SAEM grant recipients provide the best testimony to the success of the Research Fund. Samuel Yang from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine wrote, “As a recent recipient of the SAEM Research Training Grant, I would like to say that the grant has been instrumental in jump-starting my career in academic emergency medicine. It has afforded me the ‘protected’ time to develop essential research skills and grantsmanship in order to pursue my research inquiry further and become competitive for additional intra- and extramural funding.” Daniel Davis of the University of California, San Diego notes, “The SAEM Scholarly Sabbatical Grant was pivotal in allowing me to explore both basic science and clinical research and receive mentorship from two world-class scientists from my institution. It was directly responsible for my successful acquisition of both an R01 in experimental models of ischemia and a U01 as part of a resuscitation consortium.” At the special reception held at the Annual Meeting in May 2004, donors to the Research Fund discussed their motivations and reasons for contributing. For some it was to give a chance to young physicians that they never had. For others it was the advancement of original research in emergency medicine. For a few, the cycle was being completed - they had benefited from receiving training grants early in their careers, now were acknowledging the importance of this by contributing back to the cause. The Research Fund now sits at over three million dollars, and many SAEM members have contributed to the Fund. However, the largest donor remains our parent organization. In the past two years SAEM has donated $0.5 million of its reserves to the Research Fund. This is a great example of a putting our money where our mouth is. However, we cannot count on this level of donation from SAEM each year, and in order to increase the size of the Research Fund we must have a higher contribution from SAEM members. One of the most disappointing activities for SAEM each year is when the Grants Committee must choose only one recipient for the Research Training Grant, Institutional Research Training Grant, and Scholarly Sabbatical Grant, and highly qualified applicants are turned down. Our goal is that the Research Fund will function as a sustainable endowment that can provide many more grants than we are currently able to fund.
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“to improve patient care by advancing research and education in emergency medicine”