Posted on 04/05/2020 3:28:42 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Rush, I have a solution to the ventilator shortage. We need to invest in alternative breathing machines. Like one that you mentioned before was CPAP. But there’s one technology out there that’s better than the traditional ventilator. It’s called the Hemolung.
The University of Maryland and the University of Pittsburgh already have developed this technology. It’s about the size of a fishing tackle box. The difference between using the Hemolung and the traditional ventilator is that the Hemolung is like an IV or a catheter that goes in the neck down into by the heart. (snip)
think of it as a dialysis machine. It takes out CO2 and puts oxygen in the blood. And it can totally take over the lung function. They use it for lung transplant patients in Pittsburgh and in Maryland. (snip)
This device is FDA approved already. It’s called a Hemolung.
(snip) it can be a solution for the shortage of traditional ventilators. The advantage, Rush, is that the patient is breathing spontaneously. They don’t have to be sedated. They don’t have to be restrained to the bed. They don’t have to have an NG tube that feeds them. (snip)
It can be put in under local anesthesia by a surgeon, by an anesthesiologist, or by an ER physician. Then it’s hooked into this machine. The machine basically has three components: It has an oxygen tank, it has a filter that converts deoxygenated blood to oxygenated blood, and a pump.
The machine is . . . portable. So these patients can be ambulatory. They can walk around. They can eat. They do not need to be sedated. They do not need to be restrained. It frees up a lot of medical personnel . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at rushlimbaugh.com ...
Here is "an article is written by Dr. Laura Lund, Director of Scientific Affairs at ALung Technologies, in response to Medgadget’s invitation to explain the nature of the company’s Hemolung CO2 removal technology and how it can benefit patients.”
What I’d like to see in addition is as firm bid on the cost and schedule of the production of 1000 units.
We’re not going to have a problem with ventilators. We’ve got close to 200K available!
“Supply of mechanical ventilators in U.S. acute care hospitals: Based on a 2009 survey of AHA hospitals, U.S. acute care hospitals are estimated to own approximately 62,000 full-featured mechanical ventilators.10,11 Approximately 46% of these can be used to ventilate pediatric and neonatal patients. Additionally, some hospitals keep older models for emergency purposes. Older models, which are not full featured but may provide basic functions, add an additional 98,738 ventilators to the U.S. supply.10 The older devices include 22,976 noninvasive ventilators, 32,668 automatic resuscitators, and 8567 continuous positive airway pressure units.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) and other ventilator sources: The SNS has an estimated 12,700 ventilators for emergency deployment, according to recent public announcements from National Institutes of Health officials.12 These devices are also not full featured but offer basic ventilatory modes. In simulation testing they performed very well despite long-term storage.13 Accessing the SNS requires hospital administrators to request that state health officials ask for access to this equipment. SNS can deliver ventilators within 24-36 hours of the federal decision to deploy them. States may have their own ventilator stockpiles as well.14 Respiratory therapy departments also rent ventilators from local companies to meet either baseline and/or seasonal demand, further expanding their supply. Additionally, many modern anesthesia machines are capable of ventilating patients and can be used to increase hospitals’ surge capacity.
The addition of older hospital ventilators, SNS ventilators, and anesthesia machines increases the absolute number of ventilators to possibly above 200,000 units nationally. Many of the additional and older ventilators, however, may not be capable of sustained use or of adequately supporting patients with severe acute respiratory failure. Also, supplies for these ventilators may be unavailable due to interruptions in the international supply chain. Alternatively, ventilator manufacturers could be encouraged to rapidly produce modern full-featured ventilators to allow experienced clinicians to use supplemental ventilators that are familiar to them and can be readily incorporated into the hospital ventilator fleet and informatics systems. An analysis of the literature suggests, however, that U.S. hospitals could absorb a maximum of 26,000 to 56,000 additional ventilators at the peak of a national pandemic, as safe use of ventilators requires trained personnel.15”
https://sccm.org/Blog/March-2020/United-States-Resource-Availability-for-COVID-19
If so, excellent!OTOH this sounds like a far superior solution to the problem addressed by the ventilator. Might very well save lives that a ventilator can’t - and (if it isn’t being overhyped) might systematically deliver superior outcomes.
I notice that an oxygen tank is part of the system; they make battery-operated units which can extract concentrated O2 out of the air which are much more compact than an oxygen tank.
Might make life livable longer for COPD patients . . .
Not to mention the claimed reduction in the need for medical personnel . . .
How many COVID-19 patients going on ventilators are surviving?
Looking for numbers.
I heard the call in real time. The caller to Rush described a type of venous-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenator (ECMO).
He made it sound like a piece of cake, but in fact ECMO treatment is high tech, usually requires anticoagulation.
The device he described, Hemolung, is a low-flow device, which removes CO2 well, but which does not oxygenate the blood as efficiently as high-flow ECMO.
People in respiratory failure from pneumonia-ARDS have trouble with exchange of both O2 and CO2. It is not clear to me that such a device would obviate the need for a ventilator.
I heard a New York physician warn that not a lot forced on ventilators will survive.
Various numbers around the world seem to indicate about 20% will survive.
Actually, this has the potential to be much more effective than a ventilator.
I watched a video of a doctor from New York City that has been treating covid-19 patients and he said that ventilators simply weren’t working and far too many people being put on ventilators were dying. He believes that ventilators seem to make the problem worse because they were stressing the lungs.
This doctor says his patients were showing the tell-tale signs of hypoxia and we’re not exhibiting the usual signs of distress common to patients on ventilators. He believes that the red blood cells in patients simply weren’t absorbing the oxygen being fed into the lungs and transporting it. He was calling for the medical community to take a completely different look at how they are using ventilators and change the current treatment protocol.
If a Hemolung device can feed oxygen directly into the heart, it might save patients by creating a more efficient process of oxygenation, reducing the strain and damage to the lungs and preventing the patient from having to expend so much energy to breathe.
My two stepsons father was put on an ECMO machine and didn’t live to talk about it. He was 48 and contracted pneumonia after having the flu and not going to a doctor right away.
ECMO machines are a measure of last resort and often patients are so far gone that there’s little chance of them ever coming off the machine alive.
And in my earlier comment on this thread and as you stated, it does seem that the transfer of blood gases is the problem... not the inability of the muscles surrounding the lungs to properly inflate and deflate the organs.
I, like you, wonder how effective the Hemolung might be. Like all treatments, the sooner they are administered, the better the outcome.
“So these patients can be ambulatory. They can walk around. They can eat. “
From what I see, COVID patients that need to go on ventilators have pretty much one outcome.
Once you put you on ventilator your prognosis is grim.
https://marshalladg.com/insights-news/rapid-reinvention-of-iron-lung-could-save-thousands-of-lives
Thanks for the information and to all posters.
Yeah, it’s an end game tool.
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but . . .
“I wouldn’t go quite that far, but . . .”
How far would you go?
“How many COVID-19 patients going on ventilators are surviving?
Looking for numbers.”
Trump said it was so bad that he hoped no one in media would publish it.
The non-stop barking from the press about ventilators as if they were the cure is totally misleading. They are, in most cases, the end of the line.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.