Critical care medicine deals with life support or organ support for patients who are critically ill. A critical care physician diagnoses, treats, and supports patients who may be in an intensive care unit, or who may have multiple organ dysfunction. Patients who receive intensive care treatment are usually critically ill patients who are treated after major surgery and require intensive monitoring. The critical care or intensive care physician may also communicate with the patient’s primary physician, other specialists, and the critical care staff to coordinate treatment and care.

Physicians in this specialty treat patients suffering from numerous diseases and illnesses, but some of the most common are trauma, cystic fibrosis, renal failure, liver failure, post-operative care, serious infections, acute lung injury, hemodynamic instability, hypoxic injury, reversible heart & lung dysfunction, multi-organ dysfunction, airway & respiratory compromise, cardiopulmonary failure, and circulatory failure.

Once properly diagnosed, practitioners can perform numerous procedures on patients including endotracheal tube, mechanical ventilation, tracheotomy, ecmo (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), establishing central venous access, adial arterial catheterization, and passage of pulmonary arterial balloon flotation catheters.

To diagnose patients with possible illnesses and diseases, specialists will often perform one of many tests including magnetic resonance imaging (mri), computed axial tomography (ct or cat scan), blood test, and pulmonary function tests (pfts).

Doctor density varies by specialty and location. The United States has 10,066 practicing critical care medicine doctors. Broken out by state, critical care medicine doctor density in Alabama is 98, in Alaska is 15, in Arizona is 164, in Arkansas is 43, in California is 1,055, in Colorado is 164, in Connecticut is 177, in Delaware is 32, in District of Columbia is 90, in Florida is 588, in Georgia is 223, in Hawaii is 42, in Idaho is 18, in Illinois is 437, in Indiana is 210, in Iowa is 112, in Kansas is 79, in Kentucky is 117, in Louisiana is 113, in Maine is 93, in Maryland is 404, in Massachusetts is 460, in Michigan is 306, in Minnesota is 207, in Mississippi is 55, in Missouri is 295, in Montana is 18, in Nebraska is 52, in Nevada is 61, in New Hampshire is 66, in New Jersey is 349, in New Mexico is 52, in New York is 963, in North Carolina is 269, in North Dakota is 28, in Ohio is 426, in Oklahoma is 61, in Oregon is 124, in Pennsylvania is 545, in Rhode Island is 64, in South Carolina is 127, in South Dakota is 19, in Tennessee is 227, in Texas is 561, in Utah is 50, in Vermont is 23, in Virginia is 234, in Washington is 190, in West Virginia is 48, in Wisconsin is 199, and in Wyoming is 8.