This is probably a record length post for me, but I thought it was important to respond to Mr. Dwyer’s comments to a post written on this blog regarding the article he wrote that appears in the NY Times.

I had planned to leave my comments after his, but they became too long and involved and I also wanted to paste a couple of pictures from Mr. Dwyer’s article, so I instead decided to answer his criticisms in a post.

If any of you were wondering, I was not the anonymous physician who authored the previous post on Mr. Dwyer’s article. I spent most of my afternoon creating this response because Mr. Dwyer’s original article was somewhat frustrating to me, but I found his justifications and explanations for what was contained in his article to be misleading.

UPDATE
See additional commentary about Mr. Dwyer’s articles here and here.

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Dear Mr. Dwyer,

When re-reading your article, I absolutely agree with Rory’s wish that no other child – and no other family for that matter – should have to go through what Rory went through. He sounded like a great kid and he obviously had a close family and a bright future. As you also mentioned, Rory’s uncle was a friend of yours, so I can imagine that this incident affected you more than most other investigations you have performed. This topic hit home for me as well. My daughter nearly died from an invasive pneumococcal infection when she was younger. She was hospitalized for a week in a university medical center on triple antibiotics. Very scary times and we thank God that things turned out well.

So let’s go through your article and responses you made to the criticism about your article so that we can determine how to prevent kids from dying from sepsis due to invasive organisms.

JIM DWYER COMMENT:
1. You say that the stop sepsis campaign is for tracking severe sepsis. That misstates both the nature of the campaign and my citation of it in the article. The campaign’s goal is to aggressively identify sepsis and begin treatment within an hour. (The tracking of cases you cite is secondary.) To begin the process of identification, the initiative created a triage screening tool which gives a list of 8 signs and calls for additional investigation if a patient has three of them. As I wrote, Rory Staunton had two when he came into the ER. He had three when he was leaving. (BTW — his heart rate over a period of two hours ranged from 131 to 143. That’s in the article, too.) In the distribution literature with the screening tool, there is no distinction between pediatric and adult patients. Whether or not you think the values are relevant to a 12 year old, 5’9″, 169 lb boy, Rory was assessed for possible sepsis in triage.

Let’s look at the sepsis criteria according to the checklist that you posted. Then let’s apply them to children.
1. Pulse greater than 90. In children up to 2 years of age, a pulse rate less than 90 is considered too slow. In other words, ALL children up to 2 years of age should have a pulse rate greater than 90.
2. Respiratory rate greater than 20. In children up to 5 years of age, a respiratory rate less than 20 is considered too slow. In other words, ALL children up to 5 years of age should have a respiratory rate greater than 20.
So now in children who have entirely normal vital signs for their age, right away you have two of the three “danger signs” your article repeatedly emphasizes.
Add a temperature of 100.5 degrees which is essentially not a temperature at all.
Let’s give the child a runny nose which causes us to suspect a viral URI – the suspicion of an “infection” required by the criteria.
This two year old child, running around the room and laughing with his parents, with essentially normal vital signs for age, now has 4 of the criteria on the screening tool you cite.
According to the premise of your article, we must rigidly follow the criteria on the “screening tool,” which means that on every such child, doctors should get a mandatory serum lactate level, order immediate IV antibiotics, and hospitalize the patient. Heck, we should probably throw in a central line and urinary catheter as well to monitor central venous pressure and input/output.
Can you even begin to imagine all of the unnecessary added expense and adverse reactions from the antibiotics/invasive monitoring that would occur if every medical center in the country adopted Jim Dwyer’s rules of pediatric management? Every influenza season, there would be no hospital beds available for months as hospitals were forced to overtreat healthy well-appearing children while delays for care of other emergent patients precipitously increased.

The problem with your article, and something that you conveniently hid from your readers, was the disclaimer at the bottom of your so colorfully highlighted checklist

Doesn’t the disclaimer at the bottom of the checklist say something to the effect that it “should not be used as a substitute for clinical judgment”? Can’t really see the whole sentence because your placement of Rory’s labs just happens to obscure the rest of the wording. But I’ve read enough checklists and disclaimers to know that the disclaimer most likely states that the checklist should not be substituted for a physician’s clinical judgment.

Well, here, let me highlight the area I’m talking about. You can click on the image to get a bigger view if you want:

Yet, despite the checklist specifically telling you NOT to do so, that’s exactly what you did, isn’t it, Mr. Dwyer? You published an article asserting that regardless of the clinical judgment of a physician who has many years of training in medicine and who is described in your article as being “hyper-conscientious”, this protocol must be rigidly followed. You misused this guideline in order to inappropriately attack the qualifications of physicians you never met and to whom you never even spoke.

You state that the guideline and its literature made “no distinction between pediatric and adult patients,” yet you didn’t even know enough or didn’t care enough to ask what patient populations the guidelines were created for.

You keep asserting that Rory was the size of an adult. Fine. I agree. But he was still 12 years old. Unless you have evidence that the criteria have been validated in children – even adult-sized children -  don’t assert that the criteria are valid in children. You know darn well that if the situation was different, the medical treatment involved medications not approved in “children,” and Rory died after receiving the medications, you’d be the first one writing about “warnings ignored” in giving the medication. 20/20 hindsight is just crystal clear.

See a more balanced article about the same topic at ABC News.

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