CRITICAL CARE COMPLEXITY

Much of the practice of medicine is educated and experienced guess work and this is especially true in the care of the sickest patients. We have a tremendous amount of technology; a nearly endless supply of medicines; and a dizzying array of tests and procedures. Often there is a false sense of security garnered from all that modern medicine has to offer. Again, it is not so simple to treat abnormal values from tests and just do procedures in pursuit of getting the diagnosis and in treating illness. One aspect of complex systems is that all the parts are not so simply connected that fixing the malfunctioning parts individually will mend the whole. Indeed, one important characteristic of complex systems is that changes in the parts that make up the system, whether this change is part of an illness or part of a cure, can yield unpredictable responses. Again, that uncertainty.