My wife is a physician who works in a critical care setting. She did not read or approve this post; these are my thoughts as someone who hears a lot about the other side of this environment:
For the most part this seems like a sensible and reasonable article communicating what must have been an extremely difficult situation for the author. In case the author reads this: I'm really glad your dad got better and I know everybody working in the hospital appreciated the amount of patience and restraint it seems like you showed in helping him without being that patient family member who goes off the handle about everything. (There are so many of those.)
Many of the issues the author points out are very real - constantly-rotating doctors, attending disregarding consults once the consult leaves the room, the ICU not being set up for anything but bare survival - all of that is totally true from what I understand. I think, if anything, the author fails to understand how systematic and critical those issues are when he says things like this:
> So, digestive issues, hormonal issues, and mental issues all get short shrift. Basically, if there’s an obvious symptom, a consult will come in to try to treat the symptom. Then they’ll take another test in a day or so, see what happens, and go from there. There’s no sense of a scientific method, reasoning from first principles, or even reasoning from similar cases though.
I don't think this is giving the medical practitioners a fair shake here. Doctors do a huge amount of this kind of reasoning and research, even in the ICU. The trouble is often not a lack of reasoning, but a matter of, as with everything else you note, resources. Like you realized, the goal of the ICU is "keep patients alive at all costs, and worry about their comfort once they're able to be alive without our help for a while." Judgments are made with that in mind. It's not that they can't do reasoning about complex problems, it's that spending time on a complex but non-fatal problem means somebody with a potentially fatal problem won't get that time, and that's not what the ICU is for. Anything that can be solved later... will be solved later.
So the real question is not "Why didn't they help this patient with his digestive issues?", it's "Why didn't they move this patient out of the ICU once he reached the point where non-life-threatening digestive issues were relatively of any importance?"
It’s also impossible to infer the logical process from a superficial observation of the tests being done - that would be like inferring the code architecture from what’s displayed on an output device, in rare cases it might be possible, but usually not
The author even mentions that a long term stay like their father’s is rare. A lot of the criticisms are about what is, and I apologize for the expression, an edge case.
For the most part this seems like a sensible and reasonable article communicating what must have been an extremely difficult situation for the author. In case the author reads this: I'm really glad your dad got better and I know everybody working in the hospital appreciated the amount of patience and restraint it seems like you showed in helping him without being that patient family member who goes off the handle about everything. (There are so many of those.)
Many of the issues the author points out are very real - constantly-rotating doctors, attending disregarding consults once the consult leaves the room, the ICU not being set up for anything but bare survival - all of that is totally true from what I understand. I think, if anything, the author fails to understand how systematic and critical those issues are when he says things like this:
> So, digestive issues, hormonal issues, and mental issues all get short shrift. Basically, if there’s an obvious symptom, a consult will come in to try to treat the symptom. Then they’ll take another test in a day or so, see what happens, and go from there. There’s no sense of a scientific method, reasoning from first principles, or even reasoning from similar cases though.
I don't think this is giving the medical practitioners a fair shake here. Doctors do a huge amount of this kind of reasoning and research, even in the ICU. The trouble is often not a lack of reasoning, but a matter of, as with everything else you note, resources. Like you realized, the goal of the ICU is "keep patients alive at all costs, and worry about their comfort once they're able to be alive without our help for a while." Judgments are made with that in mind. It's not that they can't do reasoning about complex problems, it's that spending time on a complex but non-fatal problem means somebody with a potentially fatal problem won't get that time, and that's not what the ICU is for. Anything that can be solved later... will be solved later.
So the real question is not "Why didn't they help this patient with his digestive issues?", it's "Why didn't they move this patient out of the ICU once he reached the point where non-life-threatening digestive issues were relatively of any importance?"