Why critical care medicine

While it can be an imposing place at first, the ICU has so much to offer the junior doctor, even those not planning to become Intensivists. Every hospital specialty is responsible for a scope of conditions — Cardiologists see heart failure, General Surgeons see bowel obstruction, Respiratory Physicians see pneumonia. While these teams will comfortably handle most spectrums of disease, when the patient is critically ill they are best off in the ICU.

In the ICU, you will see the worst of everything and manage conditions beyond the scope of any other team. Having to consider the complex interplay between all the organ systems lends itself to big picture thinking. This is the extreme end of considering the whole patient, where a holistic view of the situation must be developed.

Life-changing decisions must be made for, and with, patients — often without the ability to ask the patient for their preference.

Intensivists must develop comprehensive communication and quick thinking skills to manage difficult decisions, and the satisfaction that comes from this process will help you enjoy your career. The complex systems of the body and their interplay in times of critical illness are truly the domain of the Intensivist. Nowhere else in medicine will you see such vivid demonstrations of the principles of physiology on a daily basis than in the ICU.

You will see the extremes of physiology, captured in front of your eyes through the many monitoring modalities. While other specialties will have extensive evidence upon which to base clinical decisions, this is often not possible in the ICU due to the uncharted waters we so often navigate.

The average ICU patient has multi-system disease with a background of multiple co-morbidities, and it is within this space that the Intensivist must operate. Decisions are often made on the basis of science in the absence of clinical evidence, supported by experience in managing critical illness. Overview Membership. Overview Education.

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Save Preferences. Access your subscriptions. Access through your institution. Add or change institution. Free access to newly published articles. Purchase access. Access to free article PDF downloads. Save your search. Customize your interests. Create a personal account or sign in to:. Critical care medicine encompasses the diagnosis and treatment of a wide variety of clinical problems representing the extreme of human disease. Critically ill patients require intensive care by a coordinated team.

The critical care specialist sometimes referred to as an "intensivist" may be the primary provider of care or a consultant. The intensivist needs to be competent not only in a broad range of conditions common among critically ill patients but also with the technological procedures and devices used in intensive care settings.