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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou can't use ventilators without sedatives. Now the US is running out of those, too.
Its like having a car without gas.
......To save a Covid-19 patients life with a ventilator, you also need an ample supply of medications, both to be able to use the machine and to prevent agonizing pain. Experts say theres a worrisome shortage of those, too one thats only expected to grow worse.
The minute you talk about ventilators you need to talk about medications, says Esther Choo, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. Choo says hospitals are already running out of medications like fentanyl, versed, propofol, and even neuromuscular blockades, what she calls everyday bread and butter medications, the drugs needed to induce and maintain sedation while on a ventilator. Ventilators cant really be used without these medications.
In severe cases of Covid-19, the patient's own immune system can cause their lungs to fill with fluid. At this point, ventilators are a critical tool for keeping people alive. Medical staff insert a tube deep into the lungs in a process called intubation, in order to deliver more oxygen from a ventilator than the patient can inhale on their own.
You can imagine if I tried to shove a plastic tube down your throat, its a very human reflex not to let someone do that, Choo says. So we place people in deep sedation. After the tube is placed in the trachea, patients have to stay sedated in the case of some Covid-19 patients, that can last for several weeks. Without the right medications, that experience can be agonizing, Choo says.
https://www-vox-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2020/4/6/21209589/coronavirus-medicine-ventilators-drug-shortage-sedatives-covid-19
As if we didn't have enough to worry about already. Is tRump preparing for this in any way?
SheltieLover
(57,073 posts)WTF!?!?!? 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
Ohiogal
(31,880 posts)manufactured overseas?
dalton99a
(81,371 posts)China supplies the raw ingredients that go into hundreds of drugs that are considered "essential"
SharonAnn
(13,771 posts)They kept me sedated for 3 days during that experience.
Coventina
(27,026 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)My greatest fear in the world is to reach a state like that and not have the drugs available to keep me sedated and comfortable. I think I would go mad.
Coventina
(27,026 posts)Crunchy Frog
(26,574 posts)People don't always get sedated when they should be.
Tucker08087
(621 posts)I have been saying that this medication is an immunosuppressant, and the only way it would work is if, during the incubation period, the virus becomes autoimmune in nature. That sentence about CV19 attacking a patients lungs using his/her own immune system seems to suggest that the severe respiratory failure in some patients is an autoimmune response.
And the rest of the article makes be sick. Where is Big Pharma? Or are the sedatives being taken by the Feds like my Lupus medicine?
2naSalit
(86,292 posts)Besides, we aren't suffering enough pain to get them aroused anymore.
Tucker08087
(621 posts)IF it is actually working on some people, this would be the only thing that makes sense. You dont take an immunosuppressant to kill a virus. Its completely counterproductive UNLESS it becomes autoimmune in nature very rapidly, and thats unprecedented and a beast that Im not sure we have ever faced.