You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Listening to patients in intensive care
  1. Daniel Law,
  2. Matthew Morgan
  1. Adult Critical Care, University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Matthew Morgan, Cardiff and Vale UHB, Cardiff CF14 4XW, UK; morganMP{at}cardiff.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/practneurol-2021-003255

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Reading ‘Locked-in Guillain-Barré syndrome: My living nightmare’ in this issue of Practical Neurology sends not one, but two shivers down the spine. The first comes from imagining oneself as the ‘48-year-old professional man with severe Guillain-Barré syndrome’, struggling with pain and dyspnoea, unable to communicate. We seldom read the very words spoken by patients in scientific journals. This article tugs us into their world, into their ‘living nightmare’. Thankfully, we can wake up when we choose.

    The second shiver is different. Time working as a consultant in a busy intensive care unit (ICU) often focuses on saving lives and preventing harm. Intensive care is a relatively new specialty that started when a little 12-year-old girl was ventilated during the 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen.1 Therefore, the …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles

    • Editors’ commentary
      Highlights from this issue
      Phil E M Smith Geraint N Fuller
      Practical Neurology 2022; 22 93-93 Published Online First: 17 Mar 2022. doi: 10.1136/practneurol-2022-003397
    • How to do it
      Locked-in Guillain-Barré syndrome: ‘my living nightmare’
      Neha Kumta Angus Carter Peter Schuller Hannah Evans Anika Graffunder
      Practical Neurology 2021; 22 126-128 Published Online First: 29 Oct 2021. doi: 10.1136/practneurol-2021-003110