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

Got it, but eventually the lungs fill up, and some gets forced back out, right? Even without the exhale? But it sounds like from the posts if I need a vent, I’m fricked anyway, so nevermind.

Wonder why the big manufacturers have done this already?

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Got it, but eventually the lungs fill up, and some gets forced back out, right? Even without the exhale? But it sounds like from the posts if I need a vent, I’m fricked anyway, so nevermind.

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You are missing out on a shite-ton of other things. I don't have the time to type out everything that goes along with managing a vent patient. Trust me, a lot of docs struggle with this. I had orders from a resident, that weren't kosher. Explained to him why he shouldn't do that. He went and got another resident and had me explain it to her. They ended up calling the attending at 2am, got yelled at, and told to listen to what I was saying.

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Because they want to sell you something that costs more money. Ford can still build a car that cost 10,000 bucks, but they don't.

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And runs on water, Mannnnnn!

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That is simple to make work with an electronically actuated pressure sensitive, release valve.

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A bipap/cpap provides positive pressure to the airways during a patients inspiration/expiration and supplemental O2. It doesn't provide respiratory rates or volumes over a given amount of time and pressures.

Short answer...if a person is breathing 40-50 times a minute to get rid of CO2 or obtain more oxygen...eventually they tire and simply quit breathing. Without the patient actuating the breath no benefit is gained from Cpap/Bpap. I can use a vent and breath for a completely paralyzed person, not a cpap machine.

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.

read a pretty good article on this topic yesterday. Cpap's usually operate with a discharge pressure up to 19 inches of water, ventilators operate up to twice that pressure.
cpap's mfg in the last 5-6 years can operate up to 40 inches, but need a firmware change to accommodate the requirement. Cpap msg's are working on the issue and will have a fix in a week.
the other half of the problem is the delivery system, instead of exhausting through a vent near the face, for nurses protection the vent needs to be collected to an exhaust purifying system which is pretty straightforward system.
reliability issues can be easily taken care of by redundant units and battery backup. starting with an existing system is a whole lot simpler than ford's thought to begin with a seat inflation air pump
the article described the respirator market as fairly small, meaning that if the us ramps up production to meet the corona need, the suppliers will not need to produce any for the next 5 years. the market disappears. cpap is a much larger market and is likely to be the front end suppliers of vent machines

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A bipap/cpap provides positive pressure to the airways during a patients inspiration/expiration and supplemental O2. It doesn't provide respiratory rates or volumes over a given amount of time and pressures.

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When they talk about retro fitting machines, they are basically adding the controls required to perform those functions.

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So, you don't know a damn thing about the internal workings of the machine, but you can tell somebody else, why they can't make something work?

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You should buy up some used cpaps on the cheap. Start converting them into ventilators. You'll be rich!