re: Someone Asked Why Aren’t CPAP Machines Being Used As Ventilators

Except an oropharyngeal airway doesn’t go into the windpipe. If you insert something down the windpipe (trachea), it would be called an endoTRACHEAL tube. We call that intubating.

In regards to allowing the lungs to expirate, the alveoli (smallest unit of lung tissue involved with CO2 and O2 exchange) only have so much recoil. You’d have to give significant amounts of time to allow appropriate exhalation. This is why you can only bag-mask someone so fast (the EMTs you refer to). If you squeeze the bag too fast, you “stack breaths” as we call it. You can’t do that forever, even if you have an on/off setting for a CPAP that gives several seconds of expiration, you risk not delivering enough oxygen and removing enough CO2 quick enough, which is the whole point of mechanical ventilation via endotracheal tube.

Despite not technically being engineers, there are plenty of doctors who both invent and have been engineers in previous lives. There are also plenty of inventor physicians who were also not engineers at any point.