Emergency Medicine

Pictured here is a young man called "Rajin Chowdhury". His story is long one, and a sad one. Born to a hobo (as mentioned on the endocrine page), he soon slipped into a drug addled lifestyle, that led him, aged 13, being admitted to intensive care. After 7 years in a coma, due to brain stem death, he eventually enrolled on a course in medicine at Sheffield University. Whilst far from being a star pupil (his brain stem death has led to him failing his exams several times already), he is beginning to pull his shabby life together into some semblance of being a real person. What a shame that his visa has just been refused, and he will have to be deported back to whatever awful country he came from...

Emergency Medicine

Learning about chest pain is important. So is ECG

If you watch Casualty, you will have a very realistic view of how emergency medicine is conducted in real hospitals. Apart from the fact that all the nurses and doctors do not actually have affairs with each other, hospital administrators and patients on a daily basis, in between their casual sex in elevators, near constant drug abuse, and the fact that they even have the energy after 12 hour shifts to go out drinking all night and arrive back at work still drunk the next day. And no one is as nice as Charlie in real life.

Intensive Care

Also known as critical care, this area is for people that are severely ill - on the brink of the cliff that separates life and death. They get much higher levels of staffing; at least one-on-one care, often more. It is important to understand the physiology of the body, especially cardiac, respiratory, liver and renal. Your job is to keep people alive, and hope their bodies can do the rest.

Also important is:

• Shock
• Pain management
• Coma
• Brain death