A Critical Look at the Evidence for and against Elective Epinephrine Use in the Finger
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Medical texts continue to perpetuate the belief that epinephrine should not be injected in fingers. Little attention has been paid to analyze the evidence that created this belief to see whether it is valid. The significance is that elective epinephrine finger injection has been shown to remove the need for a tourniquet, and therefore delete sedation and general anesthesia for much of hand surgery. METHODS: All of the evidence for the antiadrenaline dogma comes from 21 mostly pre-1950 case reports of finger ischemia associated with procaine and cocaine injection with epinephrine. The authors performed an in-depth analysis of those 21 cases to determine their validity as evidence. They also examined in detail all of the other evidence in the literature surrounding issues of safety with procaine, lidocaine, and epinephrine injection in the finger. RESULTS: The adrenaline digital infarction cases that created the dogma are invalid evidence because they were also injected with either procaine or cocaine, which were both known to cause digital infarction on their own at that time, and none of the 21 adrenaline infarction cases had an attempt at phentolamine rescue. CONCLUSIONS: The evidence that created the dogma that adrenaline should not be injected into the fingers is clearly not valid. However, there is considerable valid evidence in the literature that supports the tenet that properly used adrenaline in the fingers is safe, and that it removes the need for a tourniquet and therefore removes the need for sedation and general anesthesia for many hand operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.063 | 0.301 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".