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| What did we learn from the "open source ventilator" mess....... |
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| filssavi:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on July 07, 2020, 04:49:24 am --- 8 ) Raise your hand if you learned that 90% of covid patients who go on ventilators die anyway :o https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/almost-9-in-10-covid-19-patients-on-ventilators-died-in-study --- End quote --- Unfortunately those are roughly the statistics for emergency ALS/Emergency ICU in general as well I think. In my interpretation is that if the patient is in such a bad situation to need such intensive degree of treatment their situation is desperate, and if left to their own devices would have died for sure. There were also some years ago (Unrelated to Covid) some papers that questioned if ALS is even worth it, or if we should abolish it altogether (in my opinion they were flawed studies but who am I to judge). |
| Berni:
I learned the importance of understanding the project specifications before designing the thing. Pretty much 95% of all the maker built ventilators had no clue of what a ventilator is supposed to do so they ended up building various mechanical contraptions for repeatably squeezing a manual handheld ventilator. Tesla did a good example of how to do it properly. Granted it was likely more of a PR stunt (I don't have any info on how many they actually made and deployed) but at least it was engineered spot on. |
| Smokey:
--- Quote from: filssavi on July 07, 2020, 04:53:12 am ---I would not conflate the open source philosophy with makers. On one hand you have a development method used by thousands of software engineers and programmers, used to develop, most of the software stack that runs the modern world (if all open source software stopped working today, we would be thrown back to the late 1800 basically). --- End quote --- I personally use open source whenever possible, and on the rare occasion have actually tweaked the code to fix/add something, so I get it. I agree that the world pretty much runs on Linux under the hood. The open source model works really well in some circumstances. But I'm not naive enough to believe that everything needs to be open source, or that everything would be better if it was open source. That's a level of ideology bordering on religious. The bashing of Medtronic for not meeting the level of full open source purity when they released their design was pretty shocking to me. As I said elsewhere, if the only thing they had done was release their full specification (which I think they did first), that would have been worthy of sainthood to any capable engineering group wanting to take on the task of making a production ready ventilator. But instead they got shit on by the open source purists, which incidentally are a big part of the group of people who had delusions that they were capable of doing the job themselves in their garages. It was pretty obvious no one was going to take the old Medtronic design and start spinning up production, so who cares if you don't have the full CAD models for the injection molds. And yes, the PPE and other things the Makers were doing was/is great. Fully support that. When I visited the hospital about 6 weeks ago a bunch of the nurses all had 3D printed mask holder bands to save their ears from the elastic, and they loved them. I'm fully on board for using whatever skills you have to help, but being careful because overextending can be counter productive. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: james_s on July 07, 2020, 12:04:28 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on July 06, 2020, 01:09:59 pm --- --- Quote from: Psi on July 06, 2020, 12:51:39 pm ---I learnt that some people would rather die than be put on a ventilator which is not fully medically tested and certified. It kinda surprised me. --- End quote --- Don't be a twat. If they needed a ventilator, they were in no position to be able to give informed consent. Having built a lung ventilator, over half a lifetime ago, I know there are a lot of subtle ways that it can kill, even if it works correctly and according to specification. --- End quote --- Here we go again. So it's better to let someone die because they haven't given consent to try something that may be risky in order to save their life? Yes, I'm absolutely surprised that people actually think the way you seem to, floored actually. I seriously hope that if I'm going to die and unable to express my wishes that I have a doctor who is willing to be creative and try something novel to save me. If it works, great, if I die, well I was probably going to die anyway, at least they tried. I cannot even fathom why someone would think it better to simply let me (or anyone) die because the lifesaving device/procedure had risk. I'm seriously completely baffled by the attitude : :-// But what did happen with all this ventilator stuff anyway? My perception is that they managed to scrape up enough machines to get by,t combined with aggressive social distancing reduced the numbers to where we didn't need to take more drastic measures. --- End quote --- Doctors have this Hippocratic oath to contend with; primum non nocere and all that. Then they have to contend with lawyers who will convince the corpse's relatives that the doctor did something not sanctioned by the medical profession. However invalid, lawsuits are something doctors try to avoid. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: james_s on July 07, 2020, 12:04:28 am --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on July 06, 2020, 01:09:59 pm --- --- Quote from: Psi on July 06, 2020, 12:51:39 pm ---I learnt that some people would rather die than be put on a ventilator which is not fully medically tested and certified. It kinda surprised me. --- End quote --- Don't be a twat. If they needed a ventilator, they were in no position to be able to give informed consent. Having built a lung ventilator, over half a lifetime ago, I know there are a lot of subtle ways that it can kill, even if it works correctly and according to specification. --- End quote --- Here we go again. So it's better to let someone die because they haven't given consent to try something that may be risky in order to save their life? Yes, I'm absolutely surprised that people actually think the way you seem to, floored actually. I seriously hope that if I'm going to die and unable to express my wishes that I have a doctor who is willing to be creative and try something novel to save me. If it works, great, if I die, well I was probably going to die anyway, at least they tried. I cannot even fathom why someone would think it better to simply let me (or anyone) die because the lifesaving device/procedure had risk. I'm seriously completely baffled by the attitude : :-// --- End quote --- There are some nuances here. Being put on a ventilator is not like a walk in the park. Chances are extremely high you end up worse with a very low quality of life if you survive (let alone being put on a less than ideal ventilator). Some of my older family members have a 'do not ventilate' card in their wallet for this reason. Being alive and having quality of life can be very distinct; not all cultures seem to be aware of this. |
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