September 15, 2014

One of my colleagues likes to tell our residents, “they don’t come to the ED to die, they come here to live.”  It is our skill in identifying critically ill patients and successfully resuscitating them that defines us as emergency medicine physicians.  Resuscitation in its simplest term means to revive from unconsciousness or apparent death.  However, there are a multitude of different disease processes that cause critical illness, and the approach to resuscitation of each illness is quite different.  It is important to have a confident grasp of different resuscitation options and endpoints so you can best help your patients.  If you try to resuscitate all of your patients in exactly the same manner, you will actually end up harming many of them instead.

The goal here is to understand the resuscitation technique and endpoints in trauma, sepsis, and diabetic ketoacidosis.  The tried and true methods will be summarized, and areas where controversies exist will be discussed as well.  As a result, there is a wealth of information that we need to get through.  In order to lay it out for you in smaller, digestible bites, I am going to roll this out in installments.  First up….trauma! […]