Hypothermia, immune suppression and SDD: can we have our cake and eat it?

Hypothermia, immune suppression and SDD: can we have our cake and eat it?

In vitro studies and clinical observations suggest that both accidental and controlled/therapeutic hypothermia have a strong immunosuppressive effect, and that hypothermia increases the risk of infections, especially wound infections and pneumonia. In the previous issue of Critical Care, Kamps and colleagues report that when hypothermia was used for prolonged periods in patients with severe tra...

Reliable Computation on Unreliable Hardware: Can We Have Our Digital Cake and Eat It?

The digital abstraction allowed us to achieve unprecedented scalability in both hardware and software complexity. Yet, circuit level digital abstraction is becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. We show it’s possible to raise the digital abstraction up to software layers and yet provide correctnession up to software layers and yet provide correctness

Early detection of prostate cancer: can we have our cake and eat it too?

Accountable Care Organizations: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The health care debate has largely focused on the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (the ACA) aimed at expanding health insurance coverage to all Americans, most notably the individual mandate requirement. The ACA, however, also takes important steps to address the companion challenge of making health care coverage affordable by reigning in health care costs. These steps include various ini...

Rigorous evaluations of evolving interventions: can we have our cake and eat it too?

The years immediately following the widespread interest in patient safety and then healthcare quality saw considerable debate between pragmatically oriented improvers and research-oriented evaluators —or between ‘evangelists’ and ‘snails’ as one longtime observer characterised the two groups. Too often, enthusiastic improvers (‘evangelists’) relied on simple pre-post designs within a single con...