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Critical
care
Call it the care of the almost dead.
Critical Care Medicine is the area of medicine that cares for the
very sick and unstable patients. It encompasses the scope of care
delivered in the intensive care units (ICU), the coronary care units
(CCU) and the burn units.
These very sick patients usually have their blood pressure too
severely high or low, they are bleeding, they are massively infected,
their heart is beating too fast or slow, they can’t breathe, they
have just had major surgery, a heart attack, a large burn or a stroke.
In the 1960s arouse the need to have special units and specialty
physicians to care for them. In the following years, a large
panoply
of gadgets, monitors, resuscitation medications and tools were
developed. These come with the bells and whistles you see and hear
in the special units when you walk in.
As the years passed, the science and technology of Critical Care have
evolved and saved a significant number of lives every day. Techniques
such as infusion of vasopressors, mechanical ventilation and
intravenous nutrition keep patients alive for days or weeks or years
while they are unable to do it by themselves because important organs
(like their brain) have shut down. Some of them never recover, in
this case, life-sustaining therapy must be discontinued.
Critical Care physicians, otherwise call intensivists (reanimateurs
in French), go to a typical two-year of grueling training to learn
all of these techniques, all of these machines, the entire science of
keeping people alive when they are virtually dead.
For their patients, they sign a new lease on life, thereby playing
God with a sense of reward.
(OdlerRobert Jeanlouie, Saturday, December 29, 2001)
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