[The significance of internal medicine intensive care within the complex of intensive medicine. Discussion contribution to the structural and professional classification in adult intensive medicine].

The development and establishment of intensive care units for adult patients requires a far-reaching subdivision into surgical and conservatively oriented intensive care for qualitative and quantitative reasons. Insufficiently substantiated claims to monopolization of intensive care techniques that are polemically asserted have to be strongly contradicted. The present paper is concerned with approved structural concepts of intensive care developed by Deutsche Krankenhausgesellschaft and various medical societies. They are supplemented by personal experience in the field of internal intensive care.