New CDC surveillance definitions for ventilated patients aim both to broaden the focus of surveillance beyond pneumonia to include other common complications and to increase objectivity to facilitate automation, improve comparability, and minimize gaming.

With an aging population and growing demand for critical care, the number of staffed ICU beds in the U.S. may be increasingly inadequate. A promising approach to the problem is the application of advances in health information technology to triage decisions.

In 2011, a strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae resistant to multiple antibiotics, including carbapenems, was identified in the intensive care unit (ICU) of the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).¹ This organism has since colonized at ...

Mbarara is a small town in the rural southwest of Uganda, one of the poorest countries in the world. The per capita income in this equatorial East African nation is less than $4 a day, and one third of the population lives below the poverty line.¹ When ...

After receiving a ventricular assist device, a patient experiences months of advances and setbacks in the ICU. She's one of a new subcategory of ICU patients: the chronically critically ill. Their stories reveal shortcomings of common perspectives on medical decision making.

A 12-year-old girl arrives unresponsive in a Port-au-Prince emergency department, with labored breathing and right hemiplegia. In one of the few functioning ICUs in Haiti, premature death is no longer automatic. But in such an environment, how far do you go to extend life?

Paternalism in discussing resuscitation status has given way to an approach in which patients may be asked to choose from a bewildering array of medical options, but physicians-in-training are rarely taught how to lead such conversations confidently and effectively.

The FDA has issued a requirement for manufacturers of long-acting beta-agonists (LABAs) marketed for asthma to conduct controlled clinical trials to assess the safety of a regimen of LABAs plus inhaled corticosteroids as compared with inhaled corticosteroids alone.

First I will define what I conceive medicine to be. In general terms, it is to do away with the sufferings of the sick, to lessen the violence of their diseases, and to refuse to treat those who are overmastered by their disease, realizing that in such ...

Over the years, physicians have come to rely on certain drugs as standards of care because of their unique clinical effects. Reduction in the supply of these drugs can have dramatic effects on medical practice, ultimately keeping patients from receiving ...

Dr. Dominique Bayard worked in a makeshift hospital in Tabarre, a northeast section of Port-au-Prince, where the hospital staff treated more than 800 patients a day for infections, disabilities, complications from delayed treatment, respiratory illness, ...

What is the optimal approach to treatment decisions after brain injury? Drs. Robert Holloway and Timothy Quill argue that patients or their surrogates should receive transparent, timely, individualized, balanced information that allows them to make a ...

Acute adrenal insufficiency, a rare cause of shock, is manifested as shock that is poorly responsive to fluid resuscitation and pressors, not unlike cardiogenic or septic shock. It is almost always associated with a history of supraphysiologic ...