Commitment to Education

Essay: Commitment to Education and Research

We are all where we are today thanks to others lifelong commitment to education and research. It is only through countless hours spent pondering hypotheses, developing and executing research projects, writing case reports or text book chapters, fine tuning lecture series, or simply discussing a topic behind the drapes with a resident during an operative case that the art of medicine and more specifically anesthesiology is carried on from generation to generation. It is also only because of these exact same events that perioperative care, patient safety, and morbidity and mortality continue to improve. It is through commitment to research and education that advancements in medicine are made which have tremendous impact on improvements in the perioperative care of the patient and ultimately, patient outcome.

As physicians, we should constantly strive to tailor our delivery of care to each individual patient with the ultimate goal of optimizing their perioperative care and reducing associated morbidity and mortality. Attention to the most current evidence based literature combined with the ability to incorporate these techniques into one’s clinical practice is a challenging yet essential component in the practice of medicine and anesthesiology. This involves critical and inquisitive thinking and the ability to take what has been supported in the literature and travel several steps further in order to integrate these findings into the clinical arena. This also involves simultaneously nurturing a hypothesis generating environment with the goal of developing techniques which could further improve the perioperative management of patients. Research is a fundamental component in both the operative and non operative setting. In the military, we are actively pursuing a pharmacologic treatment to prevent the development of hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction and subsequent clinical altitude sickness. This project is...