What you do not know, you do not recognize…and you do not improve future patient care…particularly in extracorporeal life support (ECLS) patients

The title of this editorial comes from a statement (“Wat je kent niet, herken je niet”) by Prof. Hein J. J. Wellens, former Head of the Cardiology Department at the Maastricht University Medical Centre, The Netherlands. With this sentence, obviously, he wanted to focus on the importance of accurate and appropriate knowledge and understanding of all aspects and mechanisms of cardiovascular illnesses in advance, had the clinician to recognize what was going wrong in due time in the examined patient.