Diagnosis in the Emergency Department – a continuous challenge (case report)

Abstract

The emergency physician is often in situations when the time doesn’t work in his favour. In the Emergency Department are brought patients in serious condition, some in shock (septic, hypovolemic, cardiogenic etc.), and doctors must take decisions quickly to save their lives. Sometimes there isn’t enough time or resouces are limited to get a certain diagnose (severe cases, with fulminant evolution), so the treatment is started on the basis of the presumptive diagnose. This is also the case of the patient presented, a young man without pathological history, who was brought by ambulance to the Emergency Department of the Bucharest University Emergency Hospital. His condition was severe from the beginning and quickly progressed to sepsis with severe metabolic acidosis and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome.

Keywords

• emergency diagnose
• sepsis