Are ventilators causing more harm than good?
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Primarily for Jolly and Bach...
A podcast from earlier this week discussing ventilator management, and how unlike typical ARDS this process is.
Bottom line, they're saying we're intubating and ventilating these people way to early. These people come in with serious lack of oxygenation, but they're not necessarily in distress. One of the docs talks about a guy who walked in with a sat of 50% (that's ridiculously low) who was in no distress, albeit he was tachycardic and tachypneic. She put him on high-flow oxygen and he improved to the 80s. Her point was that this is a patient she would absolutely have intubated 3 months ago.
https://www.aaem.org/resources/publications/podcasts/critical-care-in-emergency-medicine/episode-19
Fascinating stuff.
One of my surgeon friends forwarded a tweet to me about how our thinking might change with this disease, directing me to a tweet by a ICU doc.
I responded:
"However, my sense is that we’re not really sure that COVID-19 lung injury is really ARDS. ARDS is a non-specific lung response to some kind of injury, sepsis, shock, whatever. It has a distinctive x-ray appearance, and as the Italian guys say, associated changes in lung compliance.
COVID-19 gives the same x-ray, but x-rays aren’t physiology - they’re pictures and you infer the diagnosis from that. Decades of thinking that anything that looks like ARDS must be ARDS led the guy in New York to think a different way.
Now, he may be right, and we will not know for a long time, if ever, whether he is. Nevertheless I find his comment “they don’t need pressure, they need oxygen” to be simplistic. How, exactly, are you going to provide oxygen? When intubated, and people start to desaturate, what’s the course of action you’re going to take. Presumably increase the FiO2. How high will you go? 40%? 80%? 100%. Anything above 50% has its own inherent toxicity to pneumocytes, and perhaps you’re doing ancillary damage that way."
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Are ventilators causing more harm than good?:
Primarily for Jolly and Bach...
A podcast from earlier this week discussing ventilator management, and how unlike typical ARDS this process is.
Bottom line, they're saying we're intubating and ventilating these people way to early. These people come in with serious lack of oxygenation, but they're not necessarily in distress. One of the docs talks about a guy who walked in with a sat of 50% (that's ridiculously low) who was in no distress, albeit he was tachycardic and tachypneic. She put him on high-flow oxygen and he improved to the 80s. Her point was that this is a patient she would absolutely have intubated 3 months ago.
https://www.aaem.org/resources/publications/podcasts/critical-care-in-emergency-medicine/episode-19
Fascinating stuff.
One of my surgeon friends forwarded a tweet to me about how our thinking might change with this disease, directing me to a tweet by a ICU doc.
I responded:
"However, my sense is that we’re not really sure that COVID-19 lung injury is really ARDS. ARDS is a non-specific lung response to some kind of injury, sepsis, shock, whatever. It has a distinctive x-ray appearance, and as the Italian guys say, associated changes in lung compliance.
COVID-19 gives the same x-ray, but x-rays aren’t physiology - they’re pictures and you infer the diagnosis from that. Decades of thinking that anything that looks like ARDS must be ARDS led the guy in New York to think a different way.
Now, he may be right, and we will not know for a long time, if ever, whether he is. Nevertheless I find his comment “they don’t need pressure, they need oxygen” to be simplistic. How, exactly, are you going to provide oxygen? When intubated, and people start to desaturate, what’s the course of action you’re going to take. Presumably increase the FiO2. How high will you go? 40%? 80%? 100%. Anything above 50% has its own inherent toxicity to pneumocytes, and perhaps you’re doing ancillary damage that way."
Standard at The Lady of The Lake is after they hit 5L, anything past goes to the vent. I don't know what the SaO2 has to be at that point.
Is that a universal standard or disease specific?
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Jolly said
Standard at The Lady of The Lake is after they hit 5L, anything past goes to the vent. I don't know what the SaO2 has to be at that point.
Is that a universal standard or disease specific?
I'm quite far out of the ICU loop. The podcast talks about the ARDSNET protocol for intubation. The point is that this more like high-altitude sickness rather than ARDS.
http://www.ardsnet.org/files/ventilator_protocol_2008-07.pdf
For me one of the takeaways on this is that clinical judgment might prevail over protocols and flowcharts. How the patient looks might be just as important as the numbers he presents. Whenever I got called about a situation like this, one of my first questions was "How does the patient look?" These people's numbers are terrible, but they don't look that bad, at least in the early stages.
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret.
First, the ventilator emergency needs to be re-examined. If you’re putting a patient on a ventilator because they’re going into a coma and need mechanical breathing to stay alive, okay we get it. Give ’em time for their immune systems to pull through. But if they’re conscious, alert, compliant — keep them on O2. Max it if you have to. If you HAVE to inevitably ventilate, do it at low pressure but max O2. Don’t tear up their lungs with max PEEP, you’re doing more harm to the patient because you’re treating the wrong disease.
I'm still of mixed thoughts on HCQ, but here's what this guy says:
All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them.
How does chloroquine work? Same way as it does for malaria. You see, malaria is this little parasite that enters the red blood cells and starts eating hemoglobin as its food source. The reason chloroquine works for malaria is the same reason it works for COVID-19 — while not fully understood, it is suspected to bind to DNA and interfere with the ability to work magic on hemoglobin. The same mechanism that stops malaria from getting its hands on hemoglobin and gobbling it up seems to do the same to COVID-19 (essentially little snippets of DNA in an envelope) from binding to it. On top of that, Hydroxychloroquine (an advanced descendant of regular old chloroquine) lowers the pH which can interfere with the replication of the virus. Again, while the full details are not known, the entire premise of this potentially ‘game changing’ treatment is to prevent hemoglobin from being interfered with, whether due to malaria or COVID-19.
No longer can the media and armchair pseudo-physicians sit in their little ivory towers, proclaiming “DUR so stoopid, malaria is bacteria, COVID-19 is virus, anti-bacteria drug no work on virus!”. They never got the memo that a drug doesn’t need to directly act on the pathogen to be effective. Sometimes it’s enough just to stop it from doing what it does to hemoglobin, regardless of the means it uses to do so.Of note: that link above takes you to the Wayback Machine. I wonder if Medium took it down.
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@George-K So then it's not necessarily the ventilators per se, but either our implementation of them, or our choice to use them, is that correct?
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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@Mik said in Are ventilators causing more harm than good?:
Y'know, I have long thought for a layman I had pretty good medical knowledge, or at least enough to understand with a little research. This has really stretched the limits of my knowledge.
I find blood gases and all the ins and outs of proper therapy to scramble my brains. Not that it was ever my job. Thank God all I had to do was maintain, control and run the ABG machines.
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@George-K said in Are ventilators causing more harm than good?:
@Jolly said
Standard at The Lady of The Lake is after they hit 5L, anything past goes to the vent. I don't know what the SaO2 has to be at that point.
Is that a universal standard or disease specific?
I'm quite far out of the ICU loop. The podcast talks about the ARDSNET protocol for intubation. The point is that this more like high-altitude sickness rather than ARDS.
http://www.ardsnet.org/files/ventilator_protocol_2008-07.pdf
For me one of the takeaways on this is that clinical judgment might prevail over protocols and flowcharts. How the patient looks might be just as important as the numbers he presents. Whenever I got called about a situation like this, one of my first questions was "How does the patient look?" These people's numbers are terrible, but they don't look that bad, at least in the early stages.
This is quite interesting. I shared it on FB.
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@Loki No, the reason the current projections seem so low is because the new projections are based on data vs early projections based on models of Italy, not the US.
Me/rry/Christmas
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Not even Italy. Wuhan.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
This post is deleted!
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A friend who is an ER doc in NYC shared this - story. There are better interventions available - proning and oxygen therapy appear to be more advantageous than immediately putting people on ventilators.
"At Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, Dr. Nicholas Caputo followed 50 patients who arrived with low oxygen levels between 69 and 85 percent (95 is normal). After five minutes of proning, they had improved to a mean of 94 percent. Over the next 24 hours, nearly three-quarters were able to avoid intubation; 13 needed ventilators. Proning does not seem to work as well in older patients, a number of doctors said."
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