Pediatric Anesthesia 1-2. [antikvár]

Preface For years pediatric patients have been cared for without a clear understanding of whether the care being provided was appropriate or not. There was inadequate information available on which to decide. This was due in part to the misguided feeling that research should not be done in children. Recently, things have changed. As a result, there has been an explosion of such information, much of which has come from neonatal and pediatric intensive care units. Because of this information it has been recognized that infants and children really are not small adults (some of us believe that adults are large children) and that we cannot apply adult standards to the care of pediatric patients. Unfortunately, this knowledge is widely dispersed throughout the medical literature. As a consequence, the busy practitioner and house officer, as well as the academician, may not have time to find the information he or she needs, especially in the middle of the night. Therefore, the task of writing and editing this book was undertaken. My goal was to produce a book that provided a physiologic and pharmacologic approach to anesthesia for the pediatric patient, as well as the clinical information needed to care for these patients. To reach this goal, I have gently coerced a combination of pediatricians and anesthesiologists to contribute their talents and clinical experience to the writing of this book. My dictum to them was to produce chapters that stressed physiology, embryology, pharmacology, and anatomy wherever possible. This, I believe, has been done. The first volume of the book provides the basic information needed to understand the differences between children and adults and to understand the abnormal states described in the second volume of the book. Both volumes are designed to complement one another. 1 sincerely thank Ms. Jenna Haynes for her invaluable secretarial assistance, for correcting my spelling, and for maintaining her good humor throughout the production of this book. In addition, I thank Lewis Reines, president of Churchill Livingstone, for his unflagging encouragement, and William Schmitt, for his patience with the process and with my constant questions. I thank Ann Ruzycka for her excellent editorial work. Without her help, the book would never have been completed. Finally, but certainly not least, I thank the families of the authors who may have been confronted by spouses and parents disgruntled because they had received another phone call from me urging them to get their chapter in. I apologize