The use of ether for anesthesia in the 1840s began one of the of the greatest revolutions in medicine: thanks to the abolition of pain, more complex surgeries could be performed. And how has anesthesiology and the intensive care that grew out of it intensive care out of it have changed in recent years?
These are the fields that benefit most from technological advances today. Both anesthesiology - which aims to perform procedures safely and painlessly - and intensive care, which specializes in sustaining vital functions when the body can no longer cope on its own and the patient needs to be treated not only causally, but also to keep the body functioning, are developing very rapidly.
Intensive care was basically born and "emerged" from anesthesiology. On the one hand, anesthesiology had tools that allowed monitoring of vital signs during general anesthesia - these were, for example, cardiac monitors that monitored ECG, pulse, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation. On the other hand, the apparatuses that were used for anesthesia have a design very similar to ventilators: they replace the patient's breathing. So we can say that there was a common source of development of anesthesiology and intensive care. Today, the fate of these fields is beginning to divide: in Poland and much of Europe, intensive care is still handled by anesthesiologists, but in some countries, such as Spain, the UK, intensive care is beginning to be a separate specialty. The amount of knowledge that is needed is already starting to become so large,
that a separate specialty has been created out of it.
We all learned about the importance of intensive care during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Certainly, the situation of covid patients had an impact on the development of awareness of the importance of intensive care. Most of the patients who deve...
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