Medscape: ‘Physicians [-] are beginning to question whether standard respiratory therapy protocols for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) are the best approach for treating patients with COVID-19 pneumonia’
7 April 2020
11:11
Is Protocol-Driven COVID-19 Ventilation Doing More Harm Than Good?
Physicians in the COVID-19 trenches are beginning to question whether standard respiratory therapy protocols for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) are the best approach for treating patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.
At issue is the standard use of ventilators for a virus whose presentation has not followed the standard for ARDS, but is looking more like high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) in some patients.
In a letter to the editor published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine on March 30, and in an editorial accepted for publication in Intensive Care Medicine, Luciano Gattinoni, MD, of the Medical University of Göttingen in Germany, and his colleagues make the case that protocol-driven ventilator use for patients with COVID-19 could be doing more harm than good.
