Disaster medicine

Abstract

Disaster medicine. Once we define the characteristics of both a disaster in general and specific disaster categories, the unique aspects of disaster or emergency management and disaster medicine become much easier to understand. The cornerstone of disaster medicine has an ethical aspect, namely how, as medical professionals, we must move from our daily practice in which we employ almost unlimited resources as required by each patient to a collective ethics situation in which a limited set of resources must be used to maximize the number of victims treated, so as to reach an optimal general outcome.