What is "pulmonary medicine"?
Pulmonary medicine is a specialty within internal medicine that focuses on the lungs and helps you find and understand methodologies for evaluation and then making a proper diagnosis. Making a proper diagnosis is extremely important, followed by that is the correct management. All of the systems; the evaluation, the diagnosis, and the management are constantly upgrading. We find new cures, we find new diseases, we find new methods for diagnosis, and that becomes really exciting. However, there are other aspects of pulmonary medicine that are applicable. For instance, we do most of the work that occurs in Intensive Care Units, so that if a person comes in and is critically ill, whether it's lung, or heart, or kidney or liver, they usually encounter a pulmonologist first in the ICU, who has been trained as an intensiveist. We also deal with sleep disorder breathing, so that most of the sleep centers where the diagnosis of sleep apnea etcetcera is made are run by pulmonologists. Then there's another area that's extremely important for pulmonary medicine and that's the hyperbaric chambers where we apply pressure and oxygen to the treatment of a lot of disorders. Not just carbon monoxide poisoning, air embolism, nitrogen embolisms, and accidents that occur to people who do diving, but also the application of technologies for wound healing, and that usually falls into the area of a pulmonologist.
