Observation also includes data interpretation. The therapies instiruted in ICU should see the patient through to discharge from the hospital. We need to identify the problems and assess what progress has been made to redress them. As an intensive care doctor, your priorities are different. While internal medicine can often be a specialty of deductive reasoning, taking the patient's history, reading clinical signs, making a differential diagnosis ranging from the blatantly obvious to the weird and wonderful, intensive care is about hard cold facts.
Common things are common .
Best guess reasoning. Whilst internal medicine is about gathering background information, e.g. Family history, and using deductive reasoning, intensive care is about identifying problems and solving them system by system . The patient is not seen holistically as one body, rather, as a collection of organs, which need to be fixed one by one . This is an excellent system, and useful in a high dependency unit. It is not effective in intensive care.