Common clinical appearance of critical disease is often life threatening low blood pressure, impaired consciousness up to coma, abnormal breathing patterns, and then subsequently secondary organ failures which further increases mortality. The influence of these 'macro-haemodynamic symptoms', i.e. physiologic aberrations that can be assessed using standard patient monitoring systems, on the tissue micro-circulation where organ damage and finally cell death occurs, is only indirectly available for assessment. Basically, the coarse therapeutic approach to circulatory shock is to normalize macro-haemodynamic parameters, without any robust method to evaluate and monitor micro-circulatory effects. Thus, following current guidelines and clinical practice, it is sometimes not known for sure, on an individual basis, whether treatment and stabilization measures increase survival chances.