Electrolyte Imbalance

Abstract

The subject of this paper is Electrolyte Imbalance. Unqualified, such a title may sound like an overambitious attempt to embrace within the span of forty-five minutes the whole gamut of the disordered physiology of the anions and cations. Mindful of the penalty of such vaulting ambition which would, I think, without doubt "fall on the other" its content will be limited largely to some of the more acute and dramatic examples of disturbances of body fluid that are commonly encountered in surgical patients. Surgery deals with the sort of patients of whom John Donne might well have been thinking when he said "this minute I was well and I am ill this minute " and consequently the pattern of electrolyte imbalance encountered by the surgeon is usually drawn in starker and bolder lines than is the more subtle, long drawn out problem with which the physician is often confronted. This makes life considerably easier for the surgeon who is not uncommonly a simple man of action rather than a profound thinker; an extrovert rather than an introvert, a Roman rather than a Greek. Therefore, this account is mainly from a surgeon's point of view with an occasional digression.