Dietrich Jehle, MD, a pioneer in bedside ultrasound, talking
with a patient.
The once-unheard-of practice of bedside ultrasound is now
standard in emergency rooms nationwide as the result of the
curiosity of one man, Dietrich Jehle, MD.
During a tour of German hospitals in 1982, Jehle was intrigued
by the use of bedside ultrasound machines for trauma-patient
evaluation. At the time, bedside emergency ultrasound was not done
in U.S. hospitals, and Jehle wondered why.
Never reluctant to challenge the status quo, Jehle began efforts
to introduce the practice into American emergency medicine. His
investigations bore fruit in the 1990s, when UB doctors became the
first physicians to perform trauma ultrasound in the United
States.
Jehle’s efforts to promote trauma ultrasound as the
standard of care resulted in some of the nation’s first
investigations in the field, including the first study of the use
of ultrasonography in blunt abdominal trauma by emergency
physicians and the first emergency medicine study of the use of
bedside ultrasound to evaluate abdominal pathology.
Today, under Jehle’s guidance, UB offers the only training
program in emergency ultrasonography in the country that prepares
medical residents for the American Registry of Diagnostic Medical
Sonographers (ARDMS) certification examination.
Considered the pioneer in the use of bedside emergency
ultrasound in the United States, Jehle, vice chair of UB’s
Department of Emergency Medicine, has produced seminal literature
in the field. This includes co-authoring the first textbook on
ultrasound in emergency medicine and a more recent textbook,
“Ultrasonography in Trauma: The FAST Exam.”
“Ultrasound in emergency medicine was in its infancy when
he started teaching people,” says G. Richard Braen, MD, chair
of the department. “He’s pushed it to the extent that
everybody wants to train doctors in it in their residency
programs.”
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