Welcome to the Pediatric Critical Care Blog

The Blogosphere has seemingly millions of blogs, and many of these touch on important aspects of children’s health care. However, I found none about the needs of very sick children and their families. Well, now there is one – this one. My goal is to make a small room in the huge, many-roomed mansion that is the blogosphere where we who want to talk about these things can meet. I’ll be here at least every week, and I hope others – parents, grandparents, medical professionals – will come by and add their voices, too. Be as controversial as you like – medical politics, health care funding, end-of-life issues – but please respect each other’s opinions.

An important disclaimer. What the blog cannot be, of course, is a source for specific medical advice about your child. That only occurs in the setting of a formal physician-patient relationship, which this blog is not. So you should never take what I say as substituting for that relationship between you and your child’s doctor.

Introductions over, let me begin with my definition of what people like me are, which is akin to old-time general practitioners. That notion may sound strange to anyone who would see me on a typical day in the PICU surrounded by high-tech gizmos, but it is true: physicians who run PICUs are like general practitioners for the very sick child because we look after the whole child, not just one organ or another. Or at least we should do that. The paradox of the ICU is that low-tech humanistic skills are the key to success in medicine’s highest-tech place.