Rethinking Vasopressor Education: The Need to Avoid Teaching the Bare Minimum

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Michael T McCurdy, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland; Laurence W. Busse, Emory University
• Language: English
• Date: 2023-09-29
• Publisher: The American Thoracic Society
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: Copyright © 2023 by the American Thoracic Society
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): https://doi.org/10.34197/ats-scholar.2023-0030LE
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: ATS Scholar
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 3
• Start Page: 389
• End Page: 390
• Keywords: angiotensin II receptor antagonists; endocrinology; Vasopressor; medical education; hemodynamic management; renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS); letter to the editor
• Research Categories: Health Sciences, Medicine and Surgery; Health Sciences, Education

Abstract

As medical educators, we all strive to teach in a manner that facilitates learners’ understanding, and optimizing the delivery of educational material is essential in this process. Conveying potentially complex topics to novices in an organized, methodical, and succinct approach helps to ensure that the “how” and “why” of problems are sufficiently communicated. However, the educational content (the “what”) must be sufficiently comprehensive to capture both key physiological concepts and relevant supporting data for those concepts. Although the educational format described in this brief review (1) is excellent, we believe the authors erred in their exclusion of angiotensin II and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system (RAAS).