More on sepsis

A great comment from Dr. Cory Franklin: As an ICU physician and one of the people who drafted the initial “Sepsis guidelines” in 1991-1992, I want to point out they were not drafted with the intent of clinical use, rather as study criteria for the evaluation of sepsis drugs, in that case Xigris (unsuccessful). i was one of the people who said that they should not be used as clinical criteria, since the whole concept of sepsis is ill-defined and difficult to validate. This fell on deaf ears and within a short period of time I saw ER diagnoses of R/o SIRS. IT soon became a routine clinical diagnosis, even though it was not originally meant to be. Once started there is nothing to be done. unfortunately, the concept of defining sepsis has taken hold. I wrote about it in Thorax in the mid 1990’s I believe) and I despaired of a definition, preferring to opt for teaching people what to look for and how to evaluate possible infection. (In fact, the term “sepsis” is rather new. Throughout the first two thirds of the 20th Century the terms used were “septicemia” – presumably a positive blood culture with clinical signs of infection, or “antisepsis” – ways to sterilize an environment). Sepsis came from the Greek for “putrid” – the way many infections were diagnosed in the late 19th century. It was not a particularly sensitive or specific method but it was pretty much all they had for things like puerperal infections). It is predictable that this approach will...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Medical Rants Source Type: blogs