Exhibit A: Emily Nayar, a physician assistant in rural Oklahoma. “I float between 10 different facilities, and in many I’m the only trained health care provider in the building,” she says. She’s also a Figure 1 addict, using it as a way to connect with colleagues, learn new things, and get help with her diagnoses.
A few months ago, she was working in one of those rural ERs, and in came an older gentleman whose doctor had diagnosed him with shingles. “He had been put on treatment and was taking it, but here it was four days later and he was worse,” she says. In addition to his rash, he had a horrible headache and a fever of 103. Headaches and fevers are more like flu symptoms.
In the previous month, Nayar had seen several cases of some more serious shingles variants on Figure 1. So rather than giving the man flu meds and prescribing bed rest, she figured that he might have a more serious case of shingles. A lit search led her to shingles meningitis—a version of the disease that gets into a patient’s blood and brain.
“I was able to get a lumbar puncture on this gentleman, and he was admitted to the ICU for a couple days,” she says. Without the knowledge she got from Figure 1, Nayar says it’s likely she would have sent the man home with more medication, and he probably would have died.
