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While a bad ventilator in the wrong situation may be worse than no ventilator, sometimes no ventilator means you are dead.

It is highly unlikely that anyone will build this and attempt to treat a patient at home without reading anything.

> Modern ventilators have a price tag of if you have to ask you can’t afford it.

That seems like an excellent reason for more people to look in to and think about how to reduce cost of a useful ventilator for emergency use, as an essential (but not sufficient) part of supporting large numbers of concurrent patients suffering ARDS.

Yes, if you are hypoxemic, your brain's going to be telling you to hyperventilate, which means they'll have to administer drugs to prevent you from fighting the vent. Yes, at present, there is no automated system that would be able to support a patient in any meaningful way.

However, it is worth thinking about.



> It is highly unlikely that anyone will build this and attempt to treat a patient at home without reading anything.

I’m not going to pretend that 0% of the human population could manage a ventilated patient with nothing but the appropriate texts, but it’s pretty damn close to 0%. Hell, a fresh third year med student would almost certainly kill a patient in that situation, and they’re at least supposed to understand the relevant physiology and drugs.

The vent is a tool for adjusting a couple of physiologic parameters, in the context of what is usually severe and complicated disease. It doesn’t manage anything by itself, and it’s not a RTFM situation.


It is not hypoxemia that is detected, the regulation of breathing depends on the level of carbon dioxide in the blood instead.


There is also a hypoxic breathing drive but it is weaker than the hypercapnic drive.


>It is highly unlikely that anyone will build this and attempt to treat a patient at home without reading anything

unless if they had read some stuff about what was required in treatment they decided making a ventilator was worthless, which is basically what people knowledgeable about treating patients are suggesting.


It is highly unlikely that anyone will build this and attempt to treat a patient at home without reading anything.

Citation needed.




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