Worldwide, there is a need for novel strategies to alleviate the lack of specialized medical care, including critical care medicine. Societal changes in demographics, epidemiology, and culture, in addition to significant technologic advances, have positioned telemedicine as a useful tool…
Natural and man-made disasters have always been a part of life and are occurring with increasing frequency. They create varied degrees of chaos owing to mismatch of resources and needs, and they place a huge burden on healthcare systems. Restoring…
Bedrest has historically been prescribed as an adjunct to the treatment of acute illness and to rehabilitation after surgery. Even as physicians and researchers began to realize the “evil sequelae of complete bed rest” in both medical and surgical patients,…
Despite a continuous increase in the incidence of critical illness syndromes such as sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), improvements in supportive care have resulted in improved survival over the past few decades. For example, sepsis is estimated to…
Predicting outcome is a time-honored duty of physicians, dating back at least to the time of Hippocrates. The need for a quantitative approach to outcome prediction, however, is more recent. Although a patient or family members will still want to…
The intensive care unit (ICU) is a complex environment with multiple professionals practicing together to provide patient care. Although technology and care options for critically ill patients have advanced, resulting in improved patient outcomes, they add to the complexity of…
Background Since the inception of the practice of medicine, there have been ethical challenges for doctors and other health care professionals. Many of the challenges, such as who has the authority to make key decisions (autonomy vs. paternalism) and what…
Introduction Two truisms of economics are that the supply of goods and services is finite and that supply is never sufficient to meet all demands. The tension between supply and demand for food, water, energy, education, and other goods and…
Nearly a quarter of the deaths in the United States occur in the intensive care unit (ICU), and the majority of patients who die in the ICU have had life-sustaining measures limited or withdrawn. , A decision to withhold or…
Historical perspective The increasing gap between the number of organs available for transplantation and the number of patients listed for transplantation has become a rate-limiting step in reducing both wait times and wait list deaths in patients awaiting transplantation. Before…