A-ha... here we go:
Quote:Management of the critically ill patient should be based primarily on an understanding of physiology and pathophysiology. Although the contributions of cell and molecular biology to critical care medicine are substantial, the critical care unit resembles somewhat a physiology laboratory, wherein variables such as heart rate and blood pressure are measured in an online fashion, and the effects of interventions such as vasoactive drugs can be directly observed. Although the benefit of the critical care unit is related to the availability of these physiologic data, practitioners must exercise clinical judgment and avoid the temptation to collect data for their own sake.
Consistent with this pathophysiologic approach, the interdependence of organ systems must be kept in sharp focus in critical care practice. Limited attention to one component of an illness, even if it is predominant, frequently yields a therapeutic approach that is detrimental to the patient as a whole. For example, treatment directed toward reducing intravascular volume in a patient with MODS to improve respiratory function may adversely affect renal and central nervous system function. Conversely, increasing intravascular volume to raise cardiac output in a patient with left ventricular infarction may result in noncardiogenic pulmonary edema if preexistent parenchymal lung injury is present. One of the major challenges of critical care is that physicians caring for severely ill patients must synthesize an overall management strategy that supports several organ systems and often incorporates the view of numerous consultants.
I think the context makes it pretty clear that "their" refers to "data," even if the sentence alone is ambiguously constructed. The passage is criticizing critical care units that conduct research as if they were physiology laboratories, in which things are measured and observed but not necessarily synthesized into some broader diagnosis. As the first sentence points out, the activity of collecting data does not by itself guarantee "an understanding of physiology and pathophysiology." Practitioners should collect data with some eye toward a broader goal rather than collecting data simply for the sake of collecting data.
The only argument I can make for connecting "data" to "practitioners" is the last sentence of the second paragraph, which is the only one to associate datum-collection with actual people ("consultants"). When this sentence is juxtaposed with the "data" sentence, the "their" in "data for their own sake" could conceivably be construed to mean "practitioners who do not incorporate the views of other consultants." But I find this interpretation unlikely, partly because "their own sake" does not mean "in isolation" (just as "art for art's sake" does not mean "art in isolation"), but mostly because the "consultant" sentence comes at the end of the next paragraph, whose first sentence pretty clearly marks it off as a new thought. The "consultant" sentence does not, to my ear, undermine the contextual weight of all the other preceding sentences.
