This is the podcast, ICU rounds.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Guy.

I'm an associate professor of surgery and director at the Burns Center at the Vanderbilt

University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Welcome back to the podcast.

I want to talk about a topic today that is of absolute importance,

no matter what setting you may find yourself in, whether it's in a pre-hospital setting,

the emergency department, the intensive care unit, and that's the topic of hypoxia.

And initially, when people are asked to come see a patient who may be on a mechanical ventilator,

typically they are in the intensive care unit, and the patient's suffering hypoxia,

we immediately have to go into the mode of what are the AVCs.

And that is control the airway, assist breathing after you assess it, obviously.

Make sure you've got an evaluation of the patient's

circulatory status. Are they having an arrhythmia? Are they in shock? And then go from there.

But all too commonly, the first thing that we do is increase the amount of oxygen that the

patient is getting, called the FIO2 on the ventilator, or put the patient on, say, from

6 liters nasal cannula to a 40% vending mask.

And we see an improvement in saturation, and that's the point where we leave it.

But is that really what the appropriate treatment is?

What I want to go into in this particular podcast is drilling down as to asking yourself,

why is this patient hypoxic?

I often talk about not treating the symptoms, but treating the underlying problem.

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