TY - JOUR T1 - Improving the management of spontaneous pneumothorax JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J DO - 10.1183/13993003.01918-2018 VL - 52 IS - 6 SP - 1801918 AU - José M. Porcel Y1 - 2018/12/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/52/6/1801918.abstract N2 - U. Kartoun raises a point related to the improvement of future spontaneous pneumothorax guidelines based on his personal experience as a patient who underwent video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery. He suggests that inserting a peripheral venous line and a chest tube on opposite sides of the body may limit mobility and increase pain. Although it may be adventurous to judge this particular case without further data, the underlying question is what clinical guidelines say about the ideal side for peripheral venous cannulation in patients subjected to thoracoscopy [1–3]. The information on this is deceptively scarce, probably because it is considered a minor or futile issue for physicians (but not for some patients), which falls more under the guidelines for nurses or even anaesthesiologists than pulmonologists.For thoracoscopy, the side of venous catheter placement is often, but not always, related to the side of the procedure, but the effect on patient-related outcome measures should be addressed http://ow.ly/J03W30mrAxgThanks to David Feller-Kopman (The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA), Francisco Rodriguez-Panadero (Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla, Seville, Spain), Nick Maskell (University of Bristol, Bristol, UK), Marios Froudarakis (Medical School of Alexandroupolis, Alexandroupolis, Greece), Pyng Lee (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Gary Lee (Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth, Australia), Najib Rahman (Churchill Hospital, Oxford, UK), Philippe Astoul (Hospital North Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France), Julius Janssen (Canisius Wilhelmina Hospital, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and Peter Licht (Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark) for their helpful feedback. ER -