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The world is composed of multiple, diverse populations of different race,
culture, and religion. Increasingly, these populations are mixing and intermingling,
both physically with faster and cheaper air travel, and mentally via
communication systems, including the Internet. Knowledge of other countries,
cultures, and continents can enrich society, but can also harbor conflict and
tension as different peoples struggle to understand each other without losing
their own identity. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan already envisaged that new
electronic interdependence would recreate the world in the image of a global
village.1 The intensive care “fraternity” is little different. Intensive care medicine
has grown immensely since the early days following the polio epidemics in the
1960s, but has developed in a somewhat haphazard manner until relatively
recently, when some attempt at uniformity of training has emerged at the
national and international level. Intensive care doctors (intensivists) also come
from different cultures and have different religious beliefs and backgrounds
and different academic and specialty experience. Intensive care medicine is,
therefore, practiced differently in different countries and even in different
institutions within the same country depending on broad differences in local
culture and custom, but also on the individual doctors manning the unit.
But although we may have different approaches and attitudes to the way in
which we practice intensive care medicine, which can result in heated debate
and disagreement, our ultimate aim is the same: to treat the critically ill patient
to the best of our ability within the limitations of available equipment and facilities.
Over recent years, with the development and availability of electronic mass
media, intensivists are increasingly seeing themselves as part of a bigger picture,
part of a global network of physicians, a global village within the wider medical
world, where sharing information, data, and practices across national and
international boundaries can provide benefit for us and also for our patients. |