Arthur Wheeler, M.D., professor of Medicine, received the 2015 Presidential Honor Lecture Award last month from the American College of Chest Physicians during the college’s international meeting in Montreal.
The award was given in recognition of Wheeler’s outstanding accomplishments in critical care medicine. Wheeler, who has been a member of the Vanderbilt faculty since 1989, is known internationally for his contributions to understanding and improving the treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), severe sepsis and thromboembolic disease.
Wheeler is a fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and member of the American Thoracic Society, Society of Critical Care Medicine and American Federation for Clinical Research. He also is co-author of a successful textbook, “Critical Care Medicine: The Essentials,” now in its fourth edition.
His lecture, “The way we were: a career of ‘essential’ abandoned treatments,” described how well-conducted clinical research has led to the abandonment of practices that previously were considered to be standard of care but which later were not found to be helpful and in some cases were harmful.
