Like many others who attended SMACC earlier this year I returned home dazed and confused about the significance of lactate in the septic patient.

So like any good (aspiring to be) evidence-based medicine practitioner, I started the search engines to find out what exactly everyone was on about.

Consider this post in two halves. The first section revises what I (you?) think we were taught and the second section challenges that view and asks some fundamental questions about what we mean by a raised lactate.

Lactate was discovered/identified in sour milk by Carl Wilhelm Scheele (in 1780!), who had an unlucky career, in which most of what he discovered (including oxygen!) was credited to others.

Read More