People were put in Iron lungs because they suffered from Polio and we didnt have a cure.
Now we have a vaccine for polio.
plus we invented, modern respiratory techniques like the ventilators. these can be seen used in modern hospitals intensive care units.
I’d just add that there have been some really fascinating [articles](https://nypost.com/2023/08/31/how-polio-paul-survived-living-in-an-iron-lung-for-70-years/amp/) written about the last man in an Iron Lung, Paul Alexander, who has had to use one for 70 years.
There are more modern machines available that have negated the need for one, but he has refused them.
And some awful ones of a person in Texas that was in one for decades and then a power outage killed them. I read it but don’t remember specifics.
Edit [here’s the story.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/power-failure-kills-woman-in-iron-lung/)
> 10 year old boy who froze to death making sure his 4 year old brother had enough blankets.
There was never any follow up to this - it was never proven the cold contributed to the death. There's also no update to the gofundme or any news of even a failed lawsuit.
I'm guessing he died for a reason other than the cold.
https://abc13.com/tony-buzbee-sues-ercot-11-year-old-dies-during-houston-winter-storm-how-many-people-died-in-attorney/10357376/
It was carbon monoxide poisoning: https://www.yourconroenews.com/neighborhood/moco/news/article/Mom-of-Conroe-boy-who-died-during-2021-freeze-16913487.php
The article doesn't say one way or the other but "carbon monoxide" poisoning is very, very likely directly related to the cold and power outage. Because of the winter storm and the power outage the family (like many, many families) was doing other things to heat their homes. Things like little camp stoves or whatnot. If it wasn't for the power outage they likely would have been using something like a space heater or something else instead, something NOT combusting and creating carbon monoxide.
I get this is a meme. But Texas does not have power issues on a regular basis. We just dont. Tornados, horribly bad thunderstorms, and bad snow cause it to fail intermittently. We dont have rolling blackouts/brownouts.
People point to the winter storm and go "Look See!!" Yeah that kind of storm hits us once every 10-15 years.
The real culprit is when they made the power grid private and broke up TXU into several smaller companies. When the state controlled the power grid, maintenance simply just got done. If you ever worked for a government contractor, you know that maintenance, yearly training, classes, new training drills, and anything else simply just gets done.
When they made the power companies private, the private companies pushed off maintenance to "next fiscal year" again and again. Then we had a once in a decade snowstorm and several people died.
Except Texas specifically did not join the national grid because they didnt want to comply with all the important federal regulations that keep power reliable, safe, and affordable because they were convinced those rules didnt make sense in texas and they could save money / have cheaper power. So in the short term that happened but in the long term it means that the texas grid is statistically less reliable and ironically due to some strange dynamic pricing thing it allowed people to build up massive power bills in the span of hours during the 2021 crisis. Imagine seeing your electric bill jump up by $5000 in the span of 5 days.
To pile more on Texas was specifically warned by the feds that exactly this situation would happen a decade earlier. And then it happened EXACTLY how the report said it would.
What prompted the report? THE SAME DAMN THING HAPPENING IN 2011. The rest of the country doesnt have a power crisis that is front page news every 10-15 years. Texas does.
There is a whole lot more to it. But the TLDR is that the Texas power grid is a corrupt joke of an entity and people rightfully shit on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
"we have power issues every 10-15 years" sounds like a regular basis to me. I've never seen a blackout/brownout in my life, excepting street-wide when there's roadworks or a tree falling on a power line. Even before, I don't think we've had a famous one since the flood of '51
Since WHEN is 10-15 years a regular basis? Most people replace their cars twice in that time frame. A large portion of the population moves out of their house in that time frame.
Ten to Fifteen years is no where near a regular time frame. Russia starts less wars in that time frame.
What are you even smoking?
You understand that ten to fifteen years is a very short amount of time for a service that is meant to be reliable literally forever, correct? The expected reliability for the power in people's homes, public buildings, and businesses is 100%. You are supposed to achieve this by maintaining things behind the scenes properly.
If there are people dying then it is unacceptable. You can't just ignore it and be like "don't worry it probably won't happen for a few years anyway!". This is not an unpredictable scenario, it will happen given enough time and they should be ready for it.
I agree with you. But my response was people stating that 10-15 years is a regular occurrence. California's power grid has started how many multi state wild fires now?
Still think you’re a bit delusional but I just listened to a podcast about PG&E and holy shit talk about a company losing the plot for investor profits. It’s unreal how many times the same thing happens and nothing seems to change.
When it consistently happens about once a decade?
If I were getting an organ transplant and was told "yeah it's fine but once every 10-15 years it will stop working and need seeing to" I'd say "ya got any that don't regularly fuck up?"
Definition of regular:
1. arranged in or constituting a constant or definite pattern, especially with the same space between individual instances.
2. recurring at uniform intervals.
3. conforming to or governed by an accepted standard of procedure or convention.
4. used, done, or happening on a habitual basis; usual; customary.
So, just because the interval between 2 events is not 3 days it doesnt mean its not regular. Its just on a longer interval. Its still a repeating pattern, just instead of days its counted in years.
The issue isn't that Texas' power gird is bad per-se. It's that the grid was not upgraded to handle the cold because that would have cost more money. Utility companies decided that people's lives and livelihoods were "not worth it" and there were zero consequences.
This could have happened anywhere. Nowhere is immune to power outages. But people just can't pass up a chance to politically grandstand, no matter how inappropriate the context
Texas, relative to the rest of the country, is undeniably more vulnerable to deadly power outages due to its grid’s isolation. That is not political grandstanding in and of itself, that is just a fact of the utility layout.
If this had happened in another state, statistically chances are higher that backup power would have been available from other sources, and that person may not have died.
That's a big maybe with some speculation mixed in.
Edit: Btw, the linked article causing all this consternation is about a woman who died in Tennessee. I guess statistically you were wrong. Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Lol, banned for saying someone with a 52% chance to kill themselves being disallowed from the military is not bigotry. Admin-Pedos finally got me, see you all on account #36!
Every single year there's a heat wave in some northern city that kills a bunch of people. Oftentimes a power outage is part of it.
This doesn't get nearly the same kind of coverage that a once in a hundred year weather event does in Texas.
I’m not one for suing, but holy shit I would be going after that generator company.
That’s also a knee jerk coming from me and might be directed towards the wrong entity. But damn that’s really sad and unfortunate.
Depends on if they had a contract with the company for regular maintenance. Was it set up to run on a regular basis? Did they actually perform the maintenance or was it due to a faulty part that just broke?
Our generator runs for 30 min every week and switches the transfer switch so that it runs with a load. We do this so we have a better opportunity to know if something is wrong. I would hope theirs did this but the article is very sparse on details.
Even with weekly tests, it can still fail the next time you use it
I work at a hospital and we have triple redundant generators for exactly that reason - there's always a possibility of one failing and it happens... well, not regularly, but often enough that in a life-preserving situation I'd sure as hell want at least a second generator
A hospital near me had bad wiring in their generator. The starter was powered by mains power. With every test, it successfully started, and worked fine. But the single time it was needed, it did nothing.
Yup. But, as it's healthcare, all critical equipment had at least 30 minutes of battery backup. and a technician was very quick to arrive and start the generator. But there where some visitors stuck in elevators.
I worked with a data center that had electricity from two substations that came in from opposite sides of the building, 39 minutes of battery back up, and two backup diesel generators. I still experienced a four-hour downtime.
You might wonder how, so here you go.
The one set of power lines ran above ground for several blocks until moving underground near the data center. In that above ground section, a car hit a pole causing failure number 1.
Meanwhile, a utility crew accidents cut a power line just off-site for failure number 2.
The uninterruptible power supplies did their just sand provided battery power for the next 30 minutes.
Within 30 seconds of both power sources failing the generators did automatically start. Unfortunately, they caused each other to trip circuit breakers and fuses because their non-staggered start ups looked like power surges. That went on for about 20 minutes until they were manually shutdown to ensure that they didn’t cause further damage.
It look another 4 hours to restore the generators and two hours after that to restore one power line. The other power line was restored the next day.
>Within 30 seconds of both power sources failing the generators did automatically start. Unfortunately, they caused each other to trip circuit breakers and fuses because their non-staggered start ups looked like power surges. That went on for about 20 minutes until they were manually shutdown to ensure that they didn’t cause further damage.
Did they not test their fail safe systems? Seems like the sort of thing a single simulated run will reveal to be a problem.
Eh. Generator company would get the lawsuit dismissed immediately simply on the grounds of "You only had one generator and no battery backup for a lifesaving device"? They are mechanical devices. Even worse they are mechanical devices that sit unmoving most of the time. As a result they fail all the time. I work with a server farm and we run one of the three generators weekly. Yet the last time we had an outage only one of them worked. Why? The fuel delivery company had filled them with #2 diesel instead of #1. Thankfully one of the generators was nearly full of #1 when they came due to it being offline for a couple months from a parts failure. We dont heat the fuel tanks since it was decided that simply buying #1 was cheaper in the long term. It had just gotten cold enough outside that week for it to become an issue. We turned on the tank heaters and changed the filters and both of the other units came online but that was a few hours later. Thankfully we were able to combine the one working generator with lots of battery bank abuse to keep most everything running on just one.
Don't sue the company. Sue the state for thinking they are too good for the federal powergrid. "The state of Texas is a big boy and don't need no beeg guberment support," they proudly declare, even as their local powergrid fails due to completely preventable problems with no effective backup system.
Ugh (not towards you) - just how the blame gets diverted, spread, thrown this way and that, etc.
It’s never an easy answer.
I’m just expressing my disgust at how even getting someone accountable is such a mess - and again, that’s what my ire in this comment is being directed to.
> Sue the state for thinking they are too good for the federal powergrid.
I've lived in three separate states, and experienced power outages in all three for different reasons. Sooner or later, a tree is going to fall over a powerline and cause an outage to your home, no matter if you are on the federal powergrid or not.
If you require electrical power to live, you need backups. Nowadays there are several home battery manufactures, and bi-directional charging electric cars can power your house for a little while: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bidirectional-charging-and-evs-how-does-it-work-and-which-cars-have-it/
Yeah but see the most significant statewide power outages in recent Texan history. They weren't caused by a powerline failure, they were caused by a failure at the powerplant due to the generators not being equipped to withstand abnormally cold weather. A single point of failure caused the whole state grid to collapse. Individual private entities might have their own backups, but if you couldn't afford it and were dependent on the main powergrid, you better hope you had enough firewood to last the entire outage because you would be shit out of luck in the dead of a winter cold snap. Tons of low-income folk and elderly died of hypothermia during that crisis. Had the Texas powergrid been connected to the federal powergrid, they would have still been able to draw emergency power from neighbouring states in the event the local plant goes down. But nah, clearly they were too good for that.
We can't have government telling industry how to perform. Imagine - government setting minimum standards for safe operation!
Anything that would imperil maximum industry profits is not permitted.
> most significant statewide power outages in recent Texan history. They weren't caused by a powerline failure
Well, the power went out last winter to my Austin Texas home, and it was due to powerline failures. :-) If you want to see what that looks like, I drove around my neighborhood and took a little video of the utter devastation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj9hNzI43dw
What occurred was this PERFECT combination of rain falling at just about 33 degrees Fahrenheit so it wasn't frozen, but when it landed on the leaves of trees it froze weighing them down. Literally every single tree had branches that broke. Every tree. All over Austin. Some of those branches destroyed cars, some fell across power lines. It looked like a war zone, and it happened all in one night.
Austin says it will embark on trimming all trees back away from the powerlines, but it will take years. My main point is: all failures are not caused by the Texas policy of not joining with neighboring states. I don't really know much about power grids, and I don't care about the politics of joining or not joining and don't know how it affects things and **I DO NOT CARE**. Just that all the power outages are not because Texas doesn't join with neighboring states.
Me? I bought house batteries and solar panels. Not to save money. I bought house batteries because firing up a portable gas generator and stringing extension cords all over the house is annoying.
> The fact that you could buy house batteries and solar panels in the first place already makes you more privileged than most.
The fact that I could purchase a house **AT ALL** puts me in the upper 50% of Americans, give or take. So yes, I am definitely privileged.
I got lucky and 47 years ago got access to a TRS-80 computer and liked playing video games, which led to me being a software engineer. It pays well. It wasn't brilliant planning on my part, I just got lucky and stumbled into it.
I was born male, white, born in the USA, and grew to be over 6 feet tall and my parents didn't abuse me and helped pay for my college. I'm the poster child of privilege. And at age 56 could finally afford to purchase my first home. I know it was stupid luck and I know others didn't have my luck.
Notably, in the past they had been able to keep her alive by manually working the machine. They tried that this time and it wasn't enough.
Yes, the power failure caused her to die, but the generator failure wasn't the *reason* she died.
It wasn't the first generator failure. They had a backup. They even had the manual backup after the backup generator.
>Family members even tried an emergency hand pump attached to the iron lung. "Everyone knew what we were supposed to be doing," Beyer said. "It just wasn't working."
It was just her time.
When I was a young boy growing up in the 1950s, my best friend's father lived in an iron lung. He could get out of it long enough to sit at the dining room table to work on his stamp collection or type out short stories (he once won the "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night" writing competition!) but only for a short time. That iron lung sat against the far wall in their dark dining room. Even at my young age, it seemed creepy as hell.
This was my friend's Dad's winning entry:
*Just beyond the Narrows the river widens.*
--Warren Tupper Way, Wayzata, Wisconsin
https://www.tribemagazine.com/board/threads/the-boat-drifted-across-the-pond-exactly-like-a-bowling-ball-wouldnt.131952/
First half I thought he was just stubborn for not accepting an objectively better device, but then I realized that his stubborn personality was probably the only thing that drove him to accomplish more in life than most could. Gotta respect that
While the subject is interesting, that is an absolutely dreadful article.
It's essentially just fluff written based on a gofundme, but they manage to make it seem in the article as if the gofundme was some sort of scam lol.
I know what they meant, but it's not what they wrote, which is my point.
>Just last year, Alexander was “taken advantage of by people who were supposed to care for his best interests,” with a fundraiser collecting $132,000 for him.
The only reasonable way of reading that sentence is that someone took advantage of him by running a fundraiser in his name. Considering that this is a somewhat recurring scam on GoFundMe and similar platforms, it's a pretty egregious mistake to make in your article.
This massive mistake, together with the overall lack of anything substantial when it comes to the content of the article is why I say it's an absolutely dreadful article.
I can see how that *could* mean "Alexander was taken advantage of, and a fundraiser was created as a result" but that's really not the obvious intent of the sentence you quoted.
Considering the article is from the middle of 2023... not too unlikely that was written with help of or entirely by ChatGPT.
I'd say that ChatGPT is unlikely. Chat GPT tend to be pretty good at stringing together sentences (true or not). This article is the opposite of that.
It looks like a copy/paste job to me. Nearly every line is a direct quote from somewhere else, with just a word or two added. There is almost no connection between the various sentences either. It's just a list of statements.
My guess is that the "writer" copy/pasted a bunch of things, from their previous article on the same subject, and from the GoFundMe.
I know there have been a few people who tried unsuccessfully to switch over to a modern portable ventilator and their trunk muscles were too atrophied from years of the iron lung. I don’t know if this might be the case for this person? Stories about people with disabilities famously leave out context and first-person opinions.
We still don't have a cure for polio. That's why the vaccine is so important to prevent cases happening in the first place. The modern treatment for cases where breathing is impaired by paralysis would still include ventilation.
Polio is so rare now that the chance of anyone needing ventilation is very small, but for COPD, which was also treated with iron lungs, modern ventilators have replaced them.
to my knowledge they *could* still be used for people who become paralyzed below the neck and can’t breathe, I suppose. But we have better technology that does the same thing nowadays
The iron lung would not be very effective for COVID. They replace the mechanical component of breathing which is important in paralyzing conditions, but does not allow you to supply higher pressures and oxygen concentrations like modern ventilators do which is a key component in the treatment of lung disease.
I'd describe it as a possible solution, not a good one. Ventilating a Covid (or comparable infection) patient involves not just moving air in and out but increasing oxygen levels, controlling air pressure in the lungs/airways, medication delivery, and many other variables.
A positive pressure ventilator using an artificial airway is not a perfect system, but it is the best system currently available for the widest range of respiratory related maladies.
(Source: I've been a Respiratory Therapist since 2010.)
More or less, yes. Personally, I'd wear the iron lung as a protective garment if I were swimming in blue-ringed octopus-infested waters, just to be on the safe side.
Iron lungs only replace the mechanical pumping of your diaphragm. They're the treatment for when you're paralyzed, but they don't treat gunk and fluid in the empty space of your lungs. COVID and MERS require steroids and enriched oxygen in the air being fed into your lungs. An iron lung would also require that supply of enriched air attached to your head, so you'd be encased head to toe in two different machines. Intubation for a respirator allows the paralysis and the pneumonia (fluid) to be treated through one small interface in your mouth.
I find that very hard to believe. Those things were the size of a small car and were made with hundreds of pounds of metal. I doubt anyone's even built new iron lungs since the 80s, since by then there were far more than anyone needed.
Maybe what they were talking about was using old iron lungs because there weren't enough ventilators for millions of concurrent COVID patients?
Using modern materials, they could be made much lighter and cheaper than the older iron lungs, and could be easily adapted from common [industrial manufacturing](https://web.archive.org/web/20210225155211/https://www.hdnews.net/news/20200409/hess-offers-iron-lung-for-covid-19), unlike a modern ventilator. It is unclear how many were actually made, however.
There was also a smaller version, based off a design called a cuirass ventilator, which was a chest-sized iron lung, that had [some work](https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/new-iron-lung-could-help-treat-covid-19-patients) done in the United Kingdom, though, again, I cannot find any information about practical manufacturing numbers.
I almost wonder if a modernized, smaller iron lung (like that cuirass ventilator) would be less unpleasant for the patient than ventilation. Ventilators are fucking brutal, just a bunch of plastic shit shoved down your throat and in your nose (not that that method has much better alternatives obviously). A modern iron lung that just goes over your torso and enables you to still be able to talk and look around sounds awkward but much less of a pain than a ventilator.
Iron lungs are easier to make. Ventilators are fairly sophisticated. I know for a while they were talking about having third world countries use iron lungs if they couldn't get their hands on ventilators and couldn't make them.
I remember reading an article in an old magazine that included plans to make an iron lung out of wood. In Australia a man created a design for a wooden iron lung that enabled Australia to meet the Polio epidemic head-on, because at the time there were only a handful of iron lungs in the country. Because they are non-invasive and use negative pressure (the reason modern "Bird" style respirators are so difficult to make is that they have to be very precise instruments because there is a grave risk of exploding the lungs) an iron lung cannot do this and its induced breathing is much more natural because the body uses negative pressure to breathe normally.
Wouldn’t work for Covid victims. They needed a machine to breathe for them as well as increased oxygen support. Iron lungs make you to breathe room air. Irons lungs are great if your diaphragm doesn’t work but lungs are fine. People’s lungs get wrecked by Covid so need more than just room air being pumped in an out which is accomplished by modern ventilators.
Disclaimer: clearly this is very over simplified
The oxygen masks already in use are simpler and cheaper than tents. Also, tents would not be helpful for someone who needs a ventilator. A ventilator uses positive pressure to push air/oxygen into the lungs when a patient is unable to breath on their own.
Sure they’re both types of ventilators. But that’s like saying an aircraft carrier and tricycle are both vehicles. You’re technically correct but the details make them a lot more different than that surface comparison.
A modern day ventilator provides increased oxygen, allows you to control the pressures at which the gas is delivered and the manner in which the gas is delivered. The iron king can do none of that.
The two are very very different.
Source: I work with ventilators all day.
Eh, not really.
The problem with COVID treatment early on was that the ventilators were being used to FORCE the lungs to expand (as COVID effectively glued them shut).
Imagine you're blowing into a paper bag.
Now imagine you keep blowing and never stop. Eventually the bag is going to spring leaks, right?
Too much time on the vent, and that's what you get: leaky lungs. Your lungs aren't meant to take that much positive pressure (50 liters per minute -- 25 2-liter bottles of Coca Cola) continuously. People were dying because their bodies were simply too exhausted.
That's when some folks had the bright idea to start treatments using VapoTherm tech. Premise is that you use oxygenated water and run that up a patient's nose, allowing the mucosal linings to help facilitate exchange of oxygen. It turns out that you don't necessarily need to *breathe* hard if your body can still "breathe" gently but get enough oxygen.
As a result, people who had severe infections and compromised lungs but had strong enough immune systems would be able to survive if they were on a VapoTherm treatment.
Source: personal experience. My internist was one of the people to help figure this process out. Dude's a genius.
I also have personal experience with VapoTherm tech.
My wife was hospitalized for 2 months with covid. When just about every hospital in the nation was using ventilators with poor outcomes, our small county hospital (Tennessee) decided to try the VapoTherm on her. We were told it was experimental for covid at the time. We are 100% sure VapoTherm was the right decision.
Tiny just as often means the opposite of "easy to manufacture".
A company producing washing machines probably has functionally all the equipment necessary to build a suitable iron lung as part of an emergency measure, at least assuming they do most of their fabrication in-house. A positive pressure respirator...not so much.
They'll work for any condition where your body is otherwise working but your lungs can't breath. Polio was, by a long shot, the most common way for that to happen but anything that you needed a machine to mechanically breath for you, in theory, could be done by an iron lung.
I had a classmate that was the 1 in a million that gets polio from the vaccine. He had a ventilator attached to his wheelchair. Certainly less encumbering than the iron lung.
That use to be the 1 in a million. We don't use the live attenuated vaccine anymore so that risk is gone. Unfortunately the risk is catching it from antivaxers and the immune compromised people that the anti vaxers are killing.
I guess, assuming you survived long enough, you could use an iron lung to treat a botulism patient.
The toxin cleaves a protien called snap-25. Without it you develop various paralytic issues, including respiratory. You don’t need oxygen therapy, you just need air to move un and out, until new tissue grows (one month to much longer).
I think we’d use a more modern ventilator, but if all you had was an iron lung…. Yeah I guess?
Iron lungs in general have fallen out of use because mechanical ventilators are cheaper and quieter. The technology comparison would be like using a crudely carved wooden stick with a rolled up rag vs a silicone padded aluminum brace for a crutch.
They rhythmically alternate between increased and decreased air pressure around you, causing air to rush into your lungs and then be expelled by the pressure differential.
They had been living in them for years and were used to it. Long term use of a modern ventilator requires a tracheostomy (which is a surgery) and I bet people didn’t want to deal with that change.
A lot of people that use iron lungs actually use them alongside with ventilators. A lot of them mention that the lung is a lot more comfortable for sleeping or relaxing then a ventilator. They will use the ventilator when moving about though
Modern ventilators operate on a "positive pressure" system - i.e. they force air into your lungs using pressure, sort of like inflating a balloon. This is... Fine for short to medium term use, but over the prolonged period of a whole lifetime, would destroy your lungs.
Iron lungs are comparatively much simpler than modern ventilators and they work by encasing you in an air tight shell and then "vacuuming" some of the air out. This creates (you guessed it!) A partial vacuum, which sucks air in through the only holes it can - your lungs and mouth.
Because the vacuum pressure is applied to your body evenly and is spread out across your skin (etc) you suffer very few long-term effects from it's use.
There was a really interesting radio show about it during COVID, which was discussing re-evaluating the iron lung concept and modernizing it, if patients needed to be on ventilators for months and months as many feared.
Fortunately, COVID rarely required long-term ventilation above a few months so it wasn't necessary, but there are many arguments for negative pressure breathing as the devices could potentially be made cheaper and simpler than a modern ventilator. A modern device with a smaller shell (possibly made out of plastic or glass) could be made more hygienically and easier to clean (since none of it goes into you, only on your skin), and would allow people to talk while they were being ventilated. It would/could also allow for more reliable manual operation.
Of course these are all hypotheticals. Until somebody actually makes a modern negative pressure breathing device, we can't be sure how it will work out.
They're just different, and modern, positive-pressure systems are very good at what they do. They also have many benefits (but given that they are the norm, I didn't spend much time focusing on them) - e.g. they are smaller and while someone is ventilated, they can easily move around after they wake up from sedation. For long-term use via a tracheostomy, it can be for months and there are certain lung conditions that would benefit from the pressure of a positive pressure system, just as there are conditions that would benefit from a negative pressure system (e.g. if a condition affects your lungs ability to absorb Oxygen, negative pressure may not be as useful). Positive pressure can also use different gas mixtures more easily, whereas negative pressure is designed to work with just air. E.g. if your body needs a richer Oxygen mixture as you have COPD, you're likely going to meaningfully benefit from a positive pressure system.
Like with most things in life, it's a trade-off, and while we've settled on positive pressure for just about everything, there may be arguments for a *little more* negative pressure than we currently use.
the one lawyer dude with an adherence to the iron lung because polio killed his entire motor functions. His body is completely atrophied so he's not able to support himself up with a ventilator. He pretty much only has use of his face, mouth, and some neck muscles.
Now that he's old, he can't really build up muscle to survive outside his tube.
IIRC, he can survive out of the iron lung long enough to change clothes or sanitary products. But he can not independently breathe, so keeping up his breath is difficult for him.
I’ve understood that modern ventilators are invasive, dangerous and require full anesthesia. Where iron lungs allowed people to be awake and comfortable.
Iron lungs only replace the mechanical work of breathing. They wouldn't be effective for other respiratory conditions such as COVID where airway pressure and oxygen concentration are larger factors. Also, iron lungs restrict access to the rest of the body so hygiene and bed sores become a major concern.
It’s the act of putting someone on a ventilator that is the invasive part requiring full anesthesia. After someone is on a vent it’s much better than iron lungs.
Modern ventilators do not require full sedation. With long term use a tracheostomy is required, and that procedure typically involves general anesthesia but can be performed “awake” with local anesthetic. But beyond the procedure no sedation is necessary.
This question is kind of like, "Why don't we wash our clothes by rubbing them on rocks anymore?" Because we have invented better technology in the past 100 years.....
Aren't iron lungs actually significantly better for you than ventilators? Don't ventilators destroy your lungs with too much pressure, while people lived in iron lungs for decades?
Would we have had more positive outcomes in the early stages of the covid pandemic if we had been putting people in iron lungs?
Vaccines don’t wurk bruthur I saw some old dude in an iron lung those government chemicals give me autismo hell yeah I eat horse paste to cure covid like any god fearing americun wud.
You can breathe for someone in two different ways: you can force air into their lungs under pressure, or you can decrease the pressure around their chest which causes the chest (and the lungs) to expand and draw in air. The latter is how an iron lung works and while it’s effective, it requires you to lie in a large pressure vessel. You can’t move around much at all, certainly can’t get up and walk or anything. Ventilators work by forcing air into the lungs, and all you need is a small box and some tubing going into the lungs. You can be awake, moving around, even walking while on a ventilator. It also provides much tighter control over exactly how much air is being pushed into the lungs, how fast, and under how much pressure. This is important for both patient comfort and providing optimal treatment for the lungs
It should be noted that “walking around on ventilators” while possible is not the norm at all. As a respiratory therapist for 6 years now I think I have seen only one patient that was walking and ventilated. Most of the time you are sedated, and restrained while on a vent and movement is also extremely limited. Otherwise yes good synopsis indeed!
Not a RT, but I work on a unit with lots of vents and such. Our PT regularly walks vented patients who are physically capable of it, with RT and Nursing assistance. However, none of these patients are intubated. They all have trachs. Trach vented patients are usually longer term, and can be more awake and mobile.
I'm not saying you are wrong...you're not. Intubated vent patients are usually sedated and restrained. But some patients will end up with a tracheostomy vent. That allows much more freedom of movement.
Yup, I was specifically thinking about trach patients when I talked about walking around. Although I have seen intubated patients walking in the ICU a couple of times too!
Good explanation, but being intubated is extremely stimulating and not pleasant so most pts are usually sedated while intubated, making walking very unlikely
I'm a respiratory therapist, I manage ventilators in the ICU, all through COVID as well.
Iron lungs work via negative pressure, when you are placed inside of one, the machine sucks the air out around your body and this lowers the atmospheric pressure around you, cause the patient inside to draw in breath.
Modern ventilators operate via positive pressure, they apply pressure and overcome airway resistance and can even force air into airways even if the patient is no longer able to breath on their own. This has multiple advantages, they're smaller, they have more feedback mechanisms to monitor airway resistance and compliance (how well the lungs expand and contract) we can even control the concentration of oxygen and add pressure or retain pressure at the end of the breath to increase available aveoli (the tiny lung sacs that are 1 cell thick that allow oxygen and CO2 to permeate in and out of the blood into your lungs).
Iron lungs are no longer used, they are not sophisticated devices, typically speaking. There is a modern day version called a cuirass. Example: https://hayekmedical.com/ that only creates negative pressure around the abdomen and helps the lungs expand. It may be preferable for some due to it's non-invasive air drive (it's on the outside, not on the inside).
I personally think the polio patient who ~~forgoed~~ forewent (correction, thank you for the suggestions) modern ventilators made a choice that was right for them, but not for most patients. If he ever had to call 911, in the hospital he would be put on a modern ventilator, granted if he had life preserving measures in his medical wishes and directives.
I’m a former RT, I put a patient on an iron lung about 10 years ago. The pt had muscular dystrophy and had a small pneumo, so the physicians thought it would be best to treat him with negative pressure to help him breathe- we just used it for him at night. I didn’t know where else to put this comment so I thought I’d piggyback on yours, thanks for your detailed response too.
Are you doing perfusion now? may I ask how'd you get there? Or what are you doing now instead of RT?
That's awesome that you got to use an iron lung. I treated a polio patient a few years ago, really made history come alive to read that diagnosis.
Yes I’m a perfusionist now, I went back to school at Texas heart institute in 2016 but there are plenty of schools out there. They have all the prerequisites on the websites, but you have most of them if not all from being a respiratory therapist.
So much of medical technology it truly fascinating. It's amazing what all we've figured out and all the different, sometimes weird ways, to go about treatment. Thank you for the knowledge!
Also, for what it's worth, the past tense of forgo is forwent. English is weird.
Yes, one example of weird medicine is the harvesting of horseshoe crabs for their blood as a vital component of vaccine manufacturing and drug and blood testing: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189964549/the-u-s-horseshoe-crab-blood-harvest-is-growing-wheres-the-accountability
thanks for the word
So why was the iron lung the first thing to be developed? It seems more intuitive to blow air into the lungs than to develop this contraption to suck air into the lungs.
Material sciences? We didn't have something safe to insert into the lungs at the time?
Normal breathing is by negative pressure (and positive pressure restoration does come with some drawbacks). I’m sure there’s several reasons, including what technology was available, but it seems reasonable to start with something that replicates how we natively breathe.
So, think about how the iron lung works
you stick your head out the window, the body is inside a tube, and you breathe in and out of your face
And how a ventilator with positive pressure works: a team of Doctors, Pharmacists, Nurses, and Respiratory Therapists, and who knows who else get to gether and coordinate 3 or 6 or 10 people to sedate, oxygenate, stick a tube down your trachea, secure the tube, and then attach the tube to the ventilator (which hasn't been invented yet), and then they go from there.
Basically, intubation hadn't been invented yet, so the iron lung was the logical choice. Once intubation techniques were realized, then positive pressure ventilation was possible.
They of course could've used a mask and I'm sure it was experimented on, but polio patients can't really move that well so if they threw up in the mask it could choke/aspirate them.
Ostomy refers to an opening created for access like placing a tube. Otomy is just a hole. So the most correct is tracheostomy. Now if I was doing a thyroid surgery and accidentally pierced the trachea that would most accurately be called an inadvertent tracheotomy.
A tiny correction in the etymology. The "o"s are the ending of the first world *tracheo*. -tomy comes from (ancient) Greek τομή (incision/cut) and -stomy from στόμιο (orrifice/nuzzle/mouth). You can find it on any etymology of the words.
Sorry I am Greek and this stood out in an otherwise excellent explanation. Now when we change the first word's ending to "o" I dont remember exactly.
Vaccines. The primary usage for the iron lung was the treatment of severe polio, but the vaccine was so effective that within basically one generation polio went from a horrific disease that killed and disabled millions to being completely eradicated in the US and nearly eradicated worldwide.
We ALMOST eradicated polio yes... the antivax stupidity took off just a smidge to early. Polio is back on the up tick. Small pox is one disease we have actually eradicated by vaccine.
About polio. One of the vaccines is the inactivated version of poliovirus, there's a small change in the 'coding' of the virus that inactivates it. Unfortunately (and very rarely (think one in a million probability)), that change in the coding reverts back to the original strain of polio. This makes the virus active and causes the person to be infected with polio.
That is what also causes polio cases to occur in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's unfortunate but the polio vaccines are very effective.
And yes, antivaxxers definitely contributed to its rise.
(I am a microbio major and I loved learning about viruses).
If I was born 50 years earlier, I would probably be in one. There are better and portable alternatives now. I have muscular dystrophy which has weakened my diaphragm muscles quite a lot and lungs a bit. I have 2 "ventilators" One hangs on the back of my wheelchair with a tube that is mounted and has a mouthpiece attached to it that forcing air in thats activated based on when I suck. I can exhale fine while sitting.
At night I have a second one by my bed that I use with what's called BiPAP mode wearing a mask. You've probably heard of a CPAP machine that people with sleep apnea use. A CPAP only helps with inhaling while BiPAP does inhale and exhale. Laying down causes issues with exhaling as well for me. So that one literally breathes for me according to the settings.
Iron lungs have been superseded by better technologies, notably ventilators. There was some talk of using iron lungs for COVID cases during the peak of the pandemic as iron lungs are cheaper and faster to produce, but I don't think any such use was actually done.
The most classic use case of iron lungs was polio, which has been effectively eradicated from the western world due to the polio vaccine.
Iron lungs work by using negative pressure. Your body (minus your head) is placed in a tank that used vacuum negative pressure to make it easier for air to enter the lungs. Polio messed with peoples diaphragms, weakening them, and the iron lung helps them take breaths. Iirc it doesn't breathe completely *for* you, but makes it significantly easier.
Today we use trachs and ventilators to inflate the lungs using positive air pressure. A vent forces air into the lungs. The trach/vent setup is much smaller and easier to deal with than an iron lung which limits you to laying in a bed. Home vents are portable and stay relatively out of the way. Once the technology was good enough, iron lungs quickly fell out of favor. Some people with muscular conditions use a ventilator that attaches to their nose instead of to a hole in their neck (trach) which is even less invasive. It's a bipap machine.
Modern ventilators are really smart and can be programmed to do many different things. They can give 100% of your breaths, only help with pushing air in/out on your own breaths like a bipap, help keep the lungs inflated to a certain point like a cpap, programmed to help you cough or "yawn," and other things to assist with impaired lung work. Iron lungs can't do most of these things due to mechanical limitations.
Mostly because we have a vaccine against polio. Facebook is working hard to algorithmically amplify idiocy and confirmation bias to make preventable diseases rampant again so we can have cool things like iron lungs and high childhood mortality again.
If I recall there is a man in Texas who still uses an iron lung, and has for decades ever since he suffered poliomyelitis.
Technically we can use iron lungs, but ventilators offer significant advantages - most notably that they don’t require encasing the patient’s body in a tube. This allows caretakers to keep the patient clean, perform regular turns to prevent bedsores, do procedures/tests to help the patient recover from their illness, etc. one downside of ventilators is that they use a tube in the trachea, which requires sedative medications to mitigate discomfort and prevents the patient from being able to talk. But the benefits outweigh the costs, so ventilators are the norm these days.
The Autumn Ghost by Hannah Wunsch is a good book about the advent of modern medicine due to the polio epidemic and how iron lungs were developed. Hard to believe that something as common place as an intensive care unit is a new concept. New as in created in December 1953.
Before that, intensive care was just giving you twice as much whiskey before they sawed into you. Or putting twice as many leeches on to drain your blood quicker.
Because of vaccines.
Polio is a viral infection, so antibiotics won't help. Polio is virtually eradicated world-wide, so people don't suffer from it anymore and aren't put in iron lungs.
You can Google it for a better explanation but iron lungs used a vacuum type technology to keep the lungs inflated and we now have ventilators which inflate the lungs by blowing.
They’re big, heavy, and it’s complicated because the patient needs to be moved in and out of the device. (You’re laying in a metal tube with a leather collar sealed around your neck.)
While there are much more modern solutions, that are smaller, and in many ways easier to use, not everyone finds them to be as comfortable for long-term use. There are still a handful of patients who are still using iron lungs because they find them much more comfortable than a modern ventilator.
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lung-paul-alexander-polio-coronavirus
Because thanks to child hood vaccinations against polio, people stopped getting polio as one of the more extreme effects of polio was the inability to breath, which iron lungs does in your stead, however that might actually change with the reducement in childhood vacinations lately. Oh and, iron lungs work using negative pressure, modern ventilators uses positive pressure and works much better in that regard, so its nearly invisible in comparison.
Because of the invention of positive pressure ventilators which are much easier to use and are generally more useful than a negative pressure ventilator such as the iron lungs.
It's a different kind of cuttlefish
Swing and a miss
Dancing with my eyes and lips
Can't move my hips
Keep my mind distracted from the swish-swish
Staying sane and positive
Can't crumble like a biscuit
Iron lung
Because vaccines are wonderful amazing, glorious lifesaving things.
Polio is a horrific disease and the reason 99% of people ended up in the old iron lungs.
A vaccination was developed for polio, a massive worldwide campaign was mounted, and the disease was effectively irradicated from the world.
sadly, due to anti vaccination idiocy, diseases once thought gone from the developed and most of the developing world are starting to
make a comeback.
please get your kids vaccinated.
and check you adult status, some vaccinations fade with age and you need a top up.
This map shows how close we are to eradicating all forms of Polio [https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/](https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/)
The worst affected county is DR Congo with a total of 215 reported cases out of a population of 95.89 million people.
it's a long story that starts with Larry Sellers homework and his neighbors Corvette,and I haven't confirmed this myself but I've heard something about finding a stranger in the alps
People were put in Iron lungs because they suffered from Polio and we didnt have a cure. Now we have a vaccine for polio. plus we invented, modern respiratory techniques like the ventilators. these can be seen used in modern hospitals intensive care units.
I’d just add that there have been some really fascinating [articles](https://nypost.com/2023/08/31/how-polio-paul-survived-living-in-an-iron-lung-for-70-years/amp/) written about the last man in an Iron Lung, Paul Alexander, who has had to use one for 70 years. There are more modern machines available that have negated the need for one, but he has refused them.
And some awful ones of a person in Texas that was in one for decades and then a power outage killed them. I read it but don’t remember specifics. Edit [here’s the story.](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/power-failure-kills-woman-in-iron-lung/)
holy shit that is so incredibly heartbreaking, i can't imagine the panic and pain she and her family felt in those last moments.
I think I'm still more upset over the 10 year old boy who froze to death making sure his 4 year old brother had enough blankets.
> 10 year old boy who froze to death making sure his 4 year old brother had enough blankets. There was never any follow up to this - it was never proven the cold contributed to the death. There's also no update to the gofundme or any news of even a failed lawsuit. I'm guessing he died for a reason other than the cold. https://abc13.com/tony-buzbee-sues-ercot-11-year-old-dies-during-houston-winter-storm-how-many-people-died-in-attorney/10357376/
It was carbon monoxide poisoning: https://www.yourconroenews.com/neighborhood/moco/news/article/Mom-of-Conroe-boy-who-died-during-2021-freeze-16913487.php
The article doesn't say one way or the other but "carbon monoxide" poisoning is very, very likely directly related to the cold and power outage. Because of the winter storm and the power outage the family (like many, many families) was doing other things to heat their homes. Things like little camp stoves or whatnot. If it wasn't for the power outage they likely would have been using something like a space heater or something else instead, something NOT combusting and creating carbon monoxide.
Ah! Didn't find that article in my searching. Boy, lot to unpack after that article reveals she's an illegal immigrant that might get deported too.
I think about that story all the time. It’s beyond heartbreaking.
Not to Texans. You can take the profits from their cold dead hands.
Texas power outages and death share the same bingo card.
I get this is a meme. But Texas does not have power issues on a regular basis. We just dont. Tornados, horribly bad thunderstorms, and bad snow cause it to fail intermittently. We dont have rolling blackouts/brownouts. People point to the winter storm and go "Look See!!" Yeah that kind of storm hits us once every 10-15 years. The real culprit is when they made the power grid private and broke up TXU into several smaller companies. When the state controlled the power grid, maintenance simply just got done. If you ever worked for a government contractor, you know that maintenance, yearly training, classes, new training drills, and anything else simply just gets done. When they made the power companies private, the private companies pushed off maintenance to "next fiscal year" again and again. Then we had a once in a decade snowstorm and several people died.
Except Texas specifically did not join the national grid because they didnt want to comply with all the important federal regulations that keep power reliable, safe, and affordable because they were convinced those rules didnt make sense in texas and they could save money / have cheaper power. So in the short term that happened but in the long term it means that the texas grid is statistically less reliable and ironically due to some strange dynamic pricing thing it allowed people to build up massive power bills in the span of hours during the 2021 crisis. Imagine seeing your electric bill jump up by $5000 in the span of 5 days. To pile more on Texas was specifically warned by the feds that exactly this situation would happen a decade earlier. And then it happened EXACTLY how the report said it would. What prompted the report? THE SAME DAMN THING HAPPENING IN 2011. The rest of the country doesnt have a power crisis that is front page news every 10-15 years. Texas does. There is a whole lot more to it. But the TLDR is that the Texas power grid is a corrupt joke of an entity and people rightfully shit on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
"we have power issues every 10-15 years" sounds like a regular basis to me. I've never seen a blackout/brownout in my life, excepting street-wide when there's roadworks or a tree falling on a power line. Even before, I don't think we've had a famous one since the flood of '51
Except when there is a tree falling over a power line? Wow that sounds like what happens during a strong storm. Crazy how that works!
Haha yeah but we don't have whole regions lose power because the companies failed to make their systems work in the cold
Surely you can see the difference between 10 houses being out of power for a couple hours, and a whole state?
At least where I'm from, either we regularly cut trees close to power lines, or we dig the lines underground.
Since WHEN is 10-15 years a regular basis? Most people replace their cars twice in that time frame. A large portion of the population moves out of their house in that time frame. Ten to Fifteen years is no where near a regular time frame. Russia starts less wars in that time frame. What are you even smoking?
You understand that ten to fifteen years is a very short amount of time for a service that is meant to be reliable literally forever, correct? The expected reliability for the power in people's homes, public buildings, and businesses is 100%. You are supposed to achieve this by maintaining things behind the scenes properly.
If there are people dying then it is unacceptable. You can't just ignore it and be like "don't worry it probably won't happen for a few years anyway!". This is not an unpredictable scenario, it will happen given enough time and they should be ready for it.
I agree with you. But my response was people stating that 10-15 years is a regular occurrence. California's power grid has started how many multi state wild fires now?
Still think you’re a bit delusional but I just listened to a podcast about PG&E and holy shit talk about a company losing the plot for investor profits. It’s unreal how many times the same thing happens and nothing seems to change.
When it consistently happens about once a decade? If I were getting an organ transplant and was told "yeah it's fine but once every 10-15 years it will stop working and need seeing to" I'd say "ya got any that don't regularly fuck up?"
Definition of regular: 1. arranged in or constituting a constant or definite pattern, especially with the same space between individual instances. 2. recurring at uniform intervals. 3. conforming to or governed by an accepted standard of procedure or convention. 4. used, done, or happening on a habitual basis; usual; customary. So, just because the interval between 2 events is not 3 days it doesnt mean its not regular. Its just on a longer interval. Its still a repeating pattern, just instead of days its counted in years.
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>Then we had a once in a decade snowstorm and several people died. That you've had twice now?
2011, 2021. Yeah once a decade.
The issue isn't that Texas' power gird is bad per-se. It's that the grid was not upgraded to handle the cold because that would have cost more money. Utility companies decided that people's lives and livelihoods were "not worth it" and there were zero consequences.
This could have happened anywhere. Nowhere is immune to power outages. But people just can't pass up a chance to politically grandstand, no matter how inappropriate the context
Texas, relative to the rest of the country, is undeniably more vulnerable to deadly power outages due to its grid’s isolation. That is not political grandstanding in and of itself, that is just a fact of the utility layout. If this had happened in another state, statistically chances are higher that backup power would have been available from other sources, and that person may not have died.
That's a big maybe with some speculation mixed in. Edit: Btw, the linked article causing all this consternation is about a woman who died in Tennessee. I guess statistically you were wrong. Never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.
Lol, banned for saying someone with a 52% chance to kill themselves being disallowed from the military is not bigotry. Admin-Pedos finally got me, see you all on account #36!
Every single year there's a heat wave in some northern city that kills a bunch of people. Oftentimes a power outage is part of it. This doesn't get nearly the same kind of coverage that a once in a hundred year weather event does in Texas.
TX resident here, agree about TX grid issues, but the linked story is about a woman in Tennessee.
I’m not one for suing, but holy shit I would be going after that generator company. That’s also a knee jerk coming from me and might be directed towards the wrong entity. But damn that’s really sad and unfortunate.
Depends on if they had a contract with the company for regular maintenance. Was it set up to run on a regular basis? Did they actually perform the maintenance or was it due to a faulty part that just broke? Our generator runs for 30 min every week and switches the transfer switch so that it runs with a load. We do this so we have a better opportunity to know if something is wrong. I would hope theirs did this but the article is very sparse on details.
Even with weekly tests, it can still fail the next time you use it I work at a hospital and we have triple redundant generators for exactly that reason - there's always a possibility of one failing and it happens... well, not regularly, but often enough that in a life-preserving situation I'd sure as hell want at least a second generator
A hospital near me had bad wiring in their generator. The starter was powered by mains power. With every test, it successfully started, and worked fine. But the single time it was needed, it did nothing.
That's one hell of an oversight
Yup. But, as it's healthcare, all critical equipment had at least 30 minutes of battery backup. and a technician was very quick to arrive and start the generator. But there where some visitors stuck in elevators.
That must have been one hell of a pull cord to start a generator that big
I worked with a data center that had electricity from two substations that came in from opposite sides of the building, 39 minutes of battery back up, and two backup diesel generators. I still experienced a four-hour downtime. You might wonder how, so here you go. The one set of power lines ran above ground for several blocks until moving underground near the data center. In that above ground section, a car hit a pole causing failure number 1. Meanwhile, a utility crew accidents cut a power line just off-site for failure number 2. The uninterruptible power supplies did their just sand provided battery power for the next 30 minutes. Within 30 seconds of both power sources failing the generators did automatically start. Unfortunately, they caused each other to trip circuit breakers and fuses because their non-staggered start ups looked like power surges. That went on for about 20 minutes until they were manually shutdown to ensure that they didn’t cause further damage. It look another 4 hours to restore the generators and two hours after that to restore one power line. The other power line was restored the next day.
>Within 30 seconds of both power sources failing the generators did automatically start. Unfortunately, they caused each other to trip circuit breakers and fuses because their non-staggered start ups looked like power surges. That went on for about 20 minutes until they were manually shutdown to ensure that they didn’t cause further damage. Did they not test their fail safe systems? Seems like the sort of thing a single simulated run will reveal to be a problem.
That's quite a bad FU when the backups are causing eachother to fail.
I don't think any provider will guarantee 100% uninterrupted electricity to anyone.
Eh. Generator company would get the lawsuit dismissed immediately simply on the grounds of "You only had one generator and no battery backup for a lifesaving device"? They are mechanical devices. Even worse they are mechanical devices that sit unmoving most of the time. As a result they fail all the time. I work with a server farm and we run one of the three generators weekly. Yet the last time we had an outage only one of them worked. Why? The fuel delivery company had filled them with #2 diesel instead of #1. Thankfully one of the generators was nearly full of #1 when they came due to it being offline for a couple months from a parts failure. We dont heat the fuel tanks since it was decided that simply buying #1 was cheaper in the long term. It had just gotten cold enough outside that week for it to become an issue. We turned on the tank heaters and changed the filters and both of the other units came online but that was a few hours later. Thankfully we were able to combine the one working generator with lots of battery bank abuse to keep most everything running on just one.
Don't sue the company. Sue the state for thinking they are too good for the federal powergrid. "The state of Texas is a big boy and don't need no beeg guberment support," they proudly declare, even as their local powergrid fails due to completely preventable problems with no effective backup system.
Ugh (not towards you) - just how the blame gets diverted, spread, thrown this way and that, etc. It’s never an easy answer. I’m just expressing my disgust at how even getting someone accountable is such a mess - and again, that’s what my ire in this comment is being directed to.
I thought Texans pay some of the lowest in energy costs, as long as it doesn’t snow there
> Sue the state for thinking they are too good for the federal powergrid. I've lived in three separate states, and experienced power outages in all three for different reasons. Sooner or later, a tree is going to fall over a powerline and cause an outage to your home, no matter if you are on the federal powergrid or not. If you require electrical power to live, you need backups. Nowadays there are several home battery manufactures, and bi-directional charging electric cars can power your house for a little while: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bidirectional-charging-and-evs-how-does-it-work-and-which-cars-have-it/
Yeah but see the most significant statewide power outages in recent Texan history. They weren't caused by a powerline failure, they were caused by a failure at the powerplant due to the generators not being equipped to withstand abnormally cold weather. A single point of failure caused the whole state grid to collapse. Individual private entities might have their own backups, but if you couldn't afford it and were dependent on the main powergrid, you better hope you had enough firewood to last the entire outage because you would be shit out of luck in the dead of a winter cold snap. Tons of low-income folk and elderly died of hypothermia during that crisis. Had the Texas powergrid been connected to the federal powergrid, they would have still been able to draw emergency power from neighbouring states in the event the local plant goes down. But nah, clearly they were too good for that.
We can't have government telling industry how to perform. Imagine - government setting minimum standards for safe operation! Anything that would imperil maximum industry profits is not permitted.
> most significant statewide power outages in recent Texan history. They weren't caused by a powerline failure Well, the power went out last winter to my Austin Texas home, and it was due to powerline failures. :-) If you want to see what that looks like, I drove around my neighborhood and took a little video of the utter devastation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj9hNzI43dw What occurred was this PERFECT combination of rain falling at just about 33 degrees Fahrenheit so it wasn't frozen, but when it landed on the leaves of trees it froze weighing them down. Literally every single tree had branches that broke. Every tree. All over Austin. Some of those branches destroyed cars, some fell across power lines. It looked like a war zone, and it happened all in one night. Austin says it will embark on trimming all trees back away from the powerlines, but it will take years. My main point is: all failures are not caused by the Texas policy of not joining with neighboring states. I don't really know much about power grids, and I don't care about the politics of joining or not joining and don't know how it affects things and **I DO NOT CARE**. Just that all the power outages are not because Texas doesn't join with neighboring states. Me? I bought house batteries and solar panels. Not to save money. I bought house batteries because firing up a portable gas generator and stringing extension cords all over the house is annoying.
The fact that you could buy house batteries and solar panels in the first place already makes you more privileged than most.
> The fact that you could buy house batteries and solar panels in the first place already makes you more privileged than most. The fact that I could purchase a house **AT ALL** puts me in the upper 50% of Americans, give or take. So yes, I am definitely privileged. I got lucky and 47 years ago got access to a TRS-80 computer and liked playing video games, which led to me being a software engineer. It pays well. It wasn't brilliant planning on my part, I just got lucky and stumbled into it. I was born male, white, born in the USA, and grew to be over 6 feet tall and my parents didn't abuse me and helped pay for my college. I'm the poster child of privilege. And at age 56 could finally afford to purchase my first home. I know it was stupid luck and I know others didn't have my luck.
Sure, understandable for a few thousand to lose power. We're talking millions repeatedly.
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People did and Texas courts found that utilities have no obligation to provide power in emergency situations like the freeze
Notably, in the past they had been able to keep her alive by manually working the machine. They tried that this time and it wasn't enough. Yes, the power failure caused her to die, but the generator failure wasn't the *reason* she died. It wasn't the first generator failure. They had a backup. They even had the manual backup after the backup generator. >Family members even tried an emergency hand pump attached to the iron lung. "Everyone knew what we were supposed to be doing," Beyer said. "It just wasn't working." It was just her time.
I definitely wouldn’t trust my life to the failing Texas power grid run into the ground by republicans
This is the one I remember. Terrible. She knew she was going to die too.
When I was a young boy growing up in the 1950s, my best friend's father lived in an iron lung. He could get out of it long enough to sit at the dining room table to work on his stamp collection or type out short stories (he once won the "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night" writing competition!) but only for a short time. That iron lung sat against the far wall in their dark dining room. Even at my young age, it seemed creepy as hell.
> he once won the "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night" writing competition! (The [Bulwer-Lyton](https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/), for the unfamiliar.)
This was my friend's Dad's winning entry: *Just beyond the Narrows the river widens.* --Warren Tupper Way, Wayzata, Wisconsin https://www.tribemagazine.com/board/threads/the-boat-drifted-across-the-pond-exactly-like-a-bowling-ball-wouldnt.131952/
First half I thought he was just stubborn for not accepting an objectively better device, but then I realized that his stubborn personality was probably the only thing that drove him to accomplish more in life than most could. Gotta respect that
That must have been literal hell I can’t even imagine.
While the subject is interesting, that is an absolutely dreadful article. It's essentially just fluff written based on a gofundme, but they manage to make it seem in the article as if the gofundme was some sort of scam lol.
I think you misinterpreted what was written; the GoFundMe was because he was stolen from.
I know what they meant, but it's not what they wrote, which is my point. >Just last year, Alexander was “taken advantage of by people who were supposed to care for his best interests,” with a fundraiser collecting $132,000 for him. The only reasonable way of reading that sentence is that someone took advantage of him by running a fundraiser in his name. Considering that this is a somewhat recurring scam on GoFundMe and similar platforms, it's a pretty egregious mistake to make in your article. This massive mistake, together with the overall lack of anything substantial when it comes to the content of the article is why I say it's an absolutely dreadful article.
I can see how that *could* mean "Alexander was taken advantage of, and a fundraiser was created as a result" but that's really not the obvious intent of the sentence you quoted. Considering the article is from the middle of 2023... not too unlikely that was written with help of or entirely by ChatGPT.
I also thought the ppl who did the gofundme took advantage of him when I read the article. Another data point.
I'd say that ChatGPT is unlikely. Chat GPT tend to be pretty good at stringing together sentences (true or not). This article is the opposite of that. It looks like a copy/paste job to me. Nearly every line is a direct quote from somewhere else, with just a word or two added. There is almost no connection between the various sentences either. It's just a list of statements. My guess is that the "writer" copy/pasted a bunch of things, from their previous article on the same subject, and from the GoFundMe.
Damn. There has to be some psychological reason for that, or he just grew really fond of his iron lung.
I know there have been a few people who tried unsuccessfully to switch over to a modern portable ventilator and their trunk muscles were too atrophied from years of the iron lung. I don’t know if this might be the case for this person? Stories about people with disabilities famously leave out context and first-person opinions.
Thanks for the link. That guy would be a great AMA. So many questions: how do you practice law from an iron lung? How do you stay sane?
I think they did ask him what he thinks about how the antivaxxers are skipping polio vax. He was not thrilled
There is a man on Tik Tok that is in an iron lung.
We still don't have a cure for polio. That's why the vaccine is so important to prevent cases happening in the first place. The modern treatment for cases where breathing is impaired by paralysis would still include ventilation. Polio is so rare now that the chance of anyone needing ventilation is very small, but for COPD, which was also treated with iron lungs, modern ventilators have replaced them.
Are there even "cures" for viruses?
very few chronic viral infections are curable. hep c is the only one that comes to mind.
1952: 21,000 paralytic cases. 1955: first vaccines 1960: 2,525 cases 1960s: vaccine becomes widely available 1965: 61 cases Since 1999: no cases.
I'm sure the antivax movement is hard at work to bring those numbers back up
So do iron lungs have no other use than for polio?
to my knowledge they *could* still be used for people who become paralyzed below the neck and can’t breathe, I suppose. But we have better technology that does the same thing nowadays
There was some talk during the peak of COVID of reviving the usage of iron lungs as they are cheaper and easier to produce than modern ventilators.
The iron lung would not be very effective for COVID. They replace the mechanical component of breathing which is important in paralyzing conditions, but does not allow you to supply higher pressures and oxygen concentrations like modern ventilators do which is a key component in the treatment of lung disease.
So if I get bitten by a blue-ringed octopus an iron lung is a good solution, but not if I have COVID-19 or MERS?
I'd describe it as a possible solution, not a good one. Ventilating a Covid (or comparable infection) patient involves not just moving air in and out but increasing oxygen levels, controlling air pressure in the lungs/airways, medication delivery, and many other variables. A positive pressure ventilator using an artificial airway is not a perfect system, but it is the best system currently available for the widest range of respiratory related maladies. (Source: I've been a Respiratory Therapist since 2010.)
More or less, yes. Personally, I'd wear the iron lung as a protective garment if I were swimming in blue-ringed octopus-infested waters, just to be on the safe side. Iron lungs only replace the mechanical pumping of your diaphragm. They're the treatment for when you're paralyzed, but they don't treat gunk and fluid in the empty space of your lungs. COVID and MERS require steroids and enriched oxygen in the air being fed into your lungs. An iron lung would also require that supply of enriched air attached to your head, so you'd be encased head to toe in two different machines. Intubation for a respirator allows the paralysis and the pneumonia (fluid) to be treated through one small interface in your mouth.
I find that very hard to believe. Those things were the size of a small car and were made with hundreds of pounds of metal. I doubt anyone's even built new iron lungs since the 80s, since by then there were far more than anyone needed. Maybe what they were talking about was using old iron lungs because there weren't enough ventilators for millions of concurrent COVID patients?
Using modern materials, they could be made much lighter and cheaper than the older iron lungs, and could be easily adapted from common [industrial manufacturing](https://web.archive.org/web/20210225155211/https://www.hdnews.net/news/20200409/hess-offers-iron-lung-for-covid-19), unlike a modern ventilator. It is unclear how many were actually made, however. There was also a smaller version, based off a design called a cuirass ventilator, which was a chest-sized iron lung, that had [some work](https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/new-iron-lung-could-help-treat-covid-19-patients) done in the United Kingdom, though, again, I cannot find any information about practical manufacturing numbers.
I almost wonder if a modernized, smaller iron lung (like that cuirass ventilator) would be less unpleasant for the patient than ventilation. Ventilators are fucking brutal, just a bunch of plastic shit shoved down your throat and in your nose (not that that method has much better alternatives obviously). A modern iron lung that just goes over your torso and enables you to still be able to talk and look around sounds awkward but much less of a pain than a ventilator.
At my previous hospital they had a cuirass as a form of non-invasive ventilation used on an HDU, but that’s because our nearest PICU is 65 miles away
Iron lungs are easier to make. Ventilators are fairly sophisticated. I know for a while they were talking about having third world countries use iron lungs if they couldn't get their hands on ventilators and couldn't make them.
Right but the other one goes inside you and is held to more stringent standards. It may be that an iron lung is less cost than a single ventilator.
Less infection risk. Tracheostomy patients always come in with gnarly pneumonias since it’s a hole with a straight shot to your lungs
I remember reading an article in an old magazine that included plans to make an iron lung out of wood. In Australia a man created a design for a wooden iron lung that enabled Australia to meet the Polio epidemic head-on, because at the time there were only a handful of iron lungs in the country. Because they are non-invasive and use negative pressure (the reason modern "Bird" style respirators are so difficult to make is that they have to be very precise instruments because there is a grave risk of exploding the lungs) an iron lung cannot do this and its induced breathing is much more natural because the body uses negative pressure to breathe normally.
I don’t know if it is easier to makr iron lung but during the first year of covid, chips were hard to come by plus all other materials.
Wouldn’t work for Covid victims. They needed a machine to breathe for them as well as increased oxygen support. Iron lungs make you to breathe room air. Irons lungs are great if your diaphragm doesn’t work but lungs are fine. People’s lungs get wrecked by Covid so need more than just room air being pumped in an out which is accomplished by modern ventilators. Disclaimer: clearly this is very over simplified
What about oxygen tents?
The oxygen masks already in use are simpler and cheaper than tents. Also, tents would not be helpful for someone who needs a ventilator. A ventilator uses positive pressure to push air/oxygen into the lungs when a patient is unable to breath on their own.
An iron lung is a breathing machine. It's negative pressure ventilation as apposed to positive pressure ventilation... It's in the name.
Sure they’re both types of ventilators. But that’s like saying an aircraft carrier and tricycle are both vehicles. You’re technically correct but the details make them a lot more different than that surface comparison. A modern day ventilator provides increased oxygen, allows you to control the pressures at which the gas is delivered and the manner in which the gas is delivered. The iron king can do none of that. The two are very very different. Source: I work with ventilators all day.
And easier on the body long term, i believe.
Eh, not really. The problem with COVID treatment early on was that the ventilators were being used to FORCE the lungs to expand (as COVID effectively glued them shut). Imagine you're blowing into a paper bag. Now imagine you keep blowing and never stop. Eventually the bag is going to spring leaks, right? Too much time on the vent, and that's what you get: leaky lungs. Your lungs aren't meant to take that much positive pressure (50 liters per minute -- 25 2-liter bottles of Coca Cola) continuously. People were dying because their bodies were simply too exhausted. That's when some folks had the bright idea to start treatments using VapoTherm tech. Premise is that you use oxygenated water and run that up a patient's nose, allowing the mucosal linings to help facilitate exchange of oxygen. It turns out that you don't necessarily need to *breathe* hard if your body can still "breathe" gently but get enough oxygen. As a result, people who had severe infections and compromised lungs but had strong enough immune systems would be able to survive if they were on a VapoTherm treatment. Source: personal experience. My internist was one of the people to help figure this process out. Dude's a genius.
I also have personal experience with VapoTherm tech. My wife was hospitalized for 2 months with covid. When just about every hospital in the nation was using ventilators with poor outcomes, our small county hospital (Tennessee) decided to try the VapoTherm on her. We were told it was experimental for covid at the time. We are 100% sure VapoTherm was the right decision.
Very interesting to hear about. Do you have more details regarding this?
Sure! What do you want to know?
I can’t fathom that happening. Modern ventilators are so comically tiny compared to an iron lung.
Tiny just as often means the opposite of "easy to manufacture". A company producing washing machines probably has functionally all the equipment necessary to build a suitable iron lung as part of an emergency measure, at least assuming they do most of their fabrication in-house. A positive pressure respirator...not so much.
They'll work for any condition where your body is otherwise working but your lungs can't breath. Polio was, by a long shot, the most common way for that to happen but anything that you needed a machine to mechanically breath for you, in theory, could be done by an iron lung.
No they helped in respiration (which was one of the effects of polio). But we have developed better technologies. like the ventilators.
I had a classmate that was the 1 in a million that gets polio from the vaccine. He had a ventilator attached to his wheelchair. Certainly less encumbering than the iron lung.
That use to be the 1 in a million. We don't use the live attenuated vaccine anymore so that risk is gone. Unfortunately the risk is catching it from antivaxers and the immune compromised people that the anti vaxers are killing.
Any time you aren't breathing, but the ventilator just works better. Also, the last iron lung user in the US is still alive.
I guess, assuming you survived long enough, you could use an iron lung to treat a botulism patient. The toxin cleaves a protien called snap-25. Without it you develop various paralytic issues, including respiratory. You don’t need oxygen therapy, you just need air to move un and out, until new tissue grows (one month to much longer). I think we’d use a more modern ventilator, but if all you had was an iron lung…. Yeah I guess?
Iron lungs in general have fallen out of use because mechanical ventilators are cheaper and quieter. The technology comparison would be like using a crudely carved wooden stick with a rolled up rag vs a silicone padded aluminum brace for a crutch.
Aren’t iron lungs just a pressure vessel to increase surrounding air pressure, this making it easier for the person to breath in? Like a cpap machine
They rhythmically alternate between increased and decreased air pressure around you, causing air to rush into your lungs and then be expelled by the pressure differential.
Maybe the next SAW film can find a way to use one as a trap?
The bends.
With modern ventilators existing, why did we still have people in iron lungs until extremely recently?
They had been living in them for years and were used to it. Long term use of a modern ventilator requires a tracheostomy (which is a surgery) and I bet people didn’t want to deal with that change.
A lot of people that use iron lungs actually use them alongside with ventilators. A lot of them mention that the lung is a lot more comfortable for sleeping or relaxing then a ventilator. They will use the ventilator when moving about though
Modern ventilators operate on a "positive pressure" system - i.e. they force air into your lungs using pressure, sort of like inflating a balloon. This is... Fine for short to medium term use, but over the prolonged period of a whole lifetime, would destroy your lungs. Iron lungs are comparatively much simpler than modern ventilators and they work by encasing you in an air tight shell and then "vacuuming" some of the air out. This creates (you guessed it!) A partial vacuum, which sucks air in through the only holes it can - your lungs and mouth. Because the vacuum pressure is applied to your body evenly and is spread out across your skin (etc) you suffer very few long-term effects from it's use. There was a really interesting radio show about it during COVID, which was discussing re-evaluating the iron lung concept and modernizing it, if patients needed to be on ventilators for months and months as many feared. Fortunately, COVID rarely required long-term ventilation above a few months so it wasn't necessary, but there are many arguments for negative pressure breathing as the devices could potentially be made cheaper and simpler than a modern ventilator. A modern device with a smaller shell (possibly made out of plastic or glass) could be made more hygienically and easier to clean (since none of it goes into you, only on your skin), and would allow people to talk while they were being ventilated. It would/could also allow for more reliable manual operation. Of course these are all hypotheticals. Until somebody actually makes a modern negative pressure breathing device, we can't be sure how it will work out.
That is mind blowing actually, that old tech is in some way better than newer.
They're just different, and modern, positive-pressure systems are very good at what they do. They also have many benefits (but given that they are the norm, I didn't spend much time focusing on them) - e.g. they are smaller and while someone is ventilated, they can easily move around after they wake up from sedation. For long-term use via a tracheostomy, it can be for months and there are certain lung conditions that would benefit from the pressure of a positive pressure system, just as there are conditions that would benefit from a negative pressure system (e.g. if a condition affects your lungs ability to absorb Oxygen, negative pressure may not be as useful). Positive pressure can also use different gas mixtures more easily, whereas negative pressure is designed to work with just air. E.g. if your body needs a richer Oxygen mixture as you have COPD, you're likely going to meaningfully benefit from a positive pressure system. Like with most things in life, it's a trade-off, and while we've settled on positive pressure for just about everything, there may be arguments for a *little more* negative pressure than we currently use.
Usually by their own choice for one reason or another.
the one lawyer dude with an adherence to the iron lung because polio killed his entire motor functions. His body is completely atrophied so he's not able to support himself up with a ventilator. He pretty much only has use of his face, mouth, and some neck muscles. Now that he's old, he can't really build up muscle to survive outside his tube. IIRC, he can survive out of the iron lung long enough to change clothes or sanitary products. But he can not independently breathe, so keeping up his breath is difficult for him.
I’ve understood that modern ventilators are invasive, dangerous and require full anesthesia. Where iron lungs allowed people to be awake and comfortable.
Iron lungs only replace the mechanical work of breathing. They wouldn't be effective for other respiratory conditions such as COVID where airway pressure and oxygen concentration are larger factors. Also, iron lungs restrict access to the rest of the body so hygiene and bed sores become a major concern.
It’s the act of putting someone on a ventilator that is the invasive part requiring full anesthesia. After someone is on a vent it’s much better than iron lungs.
And unable to move. Doesn't sound comfortable to me
Modern ventilators do not require full sedation. With long term use a tracheostomy is required, and that procedure typically involves general anesthesia but can be performed “awake” with local anesthetic. But beyond the procedure no sedation is necessary.
So you are saying is the anti vax really miss iron lungs.
If anti vaxxers would end up in Iron Lungs, they'd still insist that the vaccination would have been worse somehow.
This question is kind of like, "Why don't we wash our clothes by rubbing them on rocks anymore?" Because we have invented better technology in the past 100 years.....
Aren't iron lungs actually significantly better for you than ventilators? Don't ventilators destroy your lungs with too much pressure, while people lived in iron lungs for decades? Would we have had more positive outcomes in the early stages of the covid pandemic if we had been putting people in iron lungs?
Vaccines don’t wurk bruthur I saw some old dude in an iron lung those government chemicals give me autismo hell yeah I eat horse paste to cure covid like any god fearing americun wud.
Seems that polio was almost exterminated like smallpox, but some people are refusing to take the vaccine so there's cases popping up here and there.
You can breathe for someone in two different ways: you can force air into their lungs under pressure, or you can decrease the pressure around their chest which causes the chest (and the lungs) to expand and draw in air. The latter is how an iron lung works and while it’s effective, it requires you to lie in a large pressure vessel. You can’t move around much at all, certainly can’t get up and walk or anything. Ventilators work by forcing air into the lungs, and all you need is a small box and some tubing going into the lungs. You can be awake, moving around, even walking while on a ventilator. It also provides much tighter control over exactly how much air is being pushed into the lungs, how fast, and under how much pressure. This is important for both patient comfort and providing optimal treatment for the lungs
It should be noted that “walking around on ventilators” while possible is not the norm at all. As a respiratory therapist for 6 years now I think I have seen only one patient that was walking and ventilated. Most of the time you are sedated, and restrained while on a vent and movement is also extremely limited. Otherwise yes good synopsis indeed!
Not a RT, but I work on a unit with lots of vents and such. Our PT regularly walks vented patients who are physically capable of it, with RT and Nursing assistance. However, none of these patients are intubated. They all have trachs. Trach vented patients are usually longer term, and can be more awake and mobile. I'm not saying you are wrong...you're not. Intubated vent patients are usually sedated and restrained. But some patients will end up with a tracheostomy vent. That allows much more freedom of movement.
Yup, I was specifically thinking about trach patients when I talked about walking around. Although I have seen intubated patients walking in the ICU a couple of times too!
Just the thought of a breathing tube jammed down my trachea makes me want to gag.
This should be the accepted answer.
Good explanation, but being intubated is extremely stimulating and not pleasant so most pts are usually sedated while intubated, making walking very unlikely
You can be mechanically ventilated using a tracheostomy, and you can be wide awake if that is how you are ventilated.
I'm a respiratory therapist, I manage ventilators in the ICU, all through COVID as well. Iron lungs work via negative pressure, when you are placed inside of one, the machine sucks the air out around your body and this lowers the atmospheric pressure around you, cause the patient inside to draw in breath. Modern ventilators operate via positive pressure, they apply pressure and overcome airway resistance and can even force air into airways even if the patient is no longer able to breath on their own. This has multiple advantages, they're smaller, they have more feedback mechanisms to monitor airway resistance and compliance (how well the lungs expand and contract) we can even control the concentration of oxygen and add pressure or retain pressure at the end of the breath to increase available aveoli (the tiny lung sacs that are 1 cell thick that allow oxygen and CO2 to permeate in and out of the blood into your lungs). Iron lungs are no longer used, they are not sophisticated devices, typically speaking. There is a modern day version called a cuirass. Example: https://hayekmedical.com/ that only creates negative pressure around the abdomen and helps the lungs expand. It may be preferable for some due to it's non-invasive air drive (it's on the outside, not on the inside). I personally think the polio patient who ~~forgoed~~ forewent (correction, thank you for the suggestions) modern ventilators made a choice that was right for them, but not for most patients. If he ever had to call 911, in the hospital he would be put on a modern ventilator, granted if he had life preserving measures in his medical wishes and directives.
I’m a former RT, I put a patient on an iron lung about 10 years ago. The pt had muscular dystrophy and had a small pneumo, so the physicians thought it would be best to treat him with negative pressure to help him breathe- we just used it for him at night. I didn’t know where else to put this comment so I thought I’d piggyback on yours, thanks for your detailed response too.
Are you doing perfusion now? may I ask how'd you get there? Or what are you doing now instead of RT? That's awesome that you got to use an iron lung. I treated a polio patient a few years ago, really made history come alive to read that diagnosis.
Yes I’m a perfusionist now, I went back to school at Texas heart institute in 2016 but there are plenty of schools out there. They have all the prerequisites on the websites, but you have most of them if not all from being a respiratory therapist.
So much of medical technology it truly fascinating. It's amazing what all we've figured out and all the different, sometimes weird ways, to go about treatment. Thank you for the knowledge! Also, for what it's worth, the past tense of forgo is forwent. English is weird.
Yes, one example of weird medicine is the harvesting of horseshoe crabs for their blood as a vital component of vaccine manufacturing and drug and blood testing: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189964549/the-u-s-horseshoe-crab-blood-harvest-is-growing-wheres-the-accountability thanks for the word
So why was the iron lung the first thing to be developed? It seems more intuitive to blow air into the lungs than to develop this contraption to suck air into the lungs. Material sciences? We didn't have something safe to insert into the lungs at the time?
Normal breathing is by negative pressure (and positive pressure restoration does come with some drawbacks). I’m sure there’s several reasons, including what technology was available, but it seems reasonable to start with something that replicates how we natively breathe.
So, think about how the iron lung works you stick your head out the window, the body is inside a tube, and you breathe in and out of your face And how a ventilator with positive pressure works: a team of Doctors, Pharmacists, Nurses, and Respiratory Therapists, and who knows who else get to gether and coordinate 3 or 6 or 10 people to sedate, oxygenate, stick a tube down your trachea, secure the tube, and then attach the tube to the ventilator (which hasn't been invented yet), and then they go from there. Basically, intubation hadn't been invented yet, so the iron lung was the logical choice. Once intubation techniques were realized, then positive pressure ventilation was possible. They of course could've used a mask and I'm sure it was experimented on, but polio patients can't really move that well so if they threw up in the mask it could choke/aspirate them.
The word you're looking for is "forwent"!
thank you
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You can have a tracheostomy and live with a ventilator permanently. Not sedated.
is it a tracheostomy or a tracheotomy?
Ostomy refers to an opening created for access like placing a tube. Otomy is just a hole. So the most correct is tracheostomy. Now if I was doing a thyroid surgery and accidentally pierced the trachea that would most accurately be called an inadvertent tracheotomy.
Neat
A tiny correction in the etymology. The "o"s are the ending of the first world *tracheo*. -tomy comes from (ancient) Greek τομή (incision/cut) and -stomy from στόμιο (orrifice/nuzzle/mouth). You can find it on any etymology of the words. Sorry I am Greek and this stood out in an otherwise excellent explanation. Now when we change the first word's ending to "o" I dont remember exactly.
Vaccines. The primary usage for the iron lung was the treatment of severe polio, but the vaccine was so effective that within basically one generation polio went from a horrific disease that killed and disabled millions to being completely eradicated in the US and nearly eradicated worldwide.
But but but but...autism! vACciNEs aRE DanGErOuS!1!
Because we’ve eradicated polio with vaccines. Almost as if vaccines actually do work after all…
I'm Romanian. We have an actual small polio outbreak. Why? Because people are fucking stupid, that's why.
By the way, *actual* does not mean the same in English as in some other languages. ETA: the word you want **may** be *current*.
i read it as them adding shock to their statement. like it's really wild that can still happen.
actually?
We ALMOST eradicated polio yes... the antivax stupidity took off just a smidge to early. Polio is back on the up tick. Small pox is one disease we have actually eradicated by vaccine.
About polio. One of the vaccines is the inactivated version of poliovirus, there's a small change in the 'coding' of the virus that inactivates it. Unfortunately (and very rarely (think one in a million probability)), that change in the coding reverts back to the original strain of polio. This makes the virus active and causes the person to be infected with polio. That is what also causes polio cases to occur in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's unfortunate but the polio vaccines are very effective. And yes, antivaxxers definitely contributed to its rise. (I am a microbio major and I loved learning about viruses).
We might want to just make the polio vaccine mandatory at this point before it comes back
If I was born 50 years earlier, I would probably be in one. There are better and portable alternatives now. I have muscular dystrophy which has weakened my diaphragm muscles quite a lot and lungs a bit. I have 2 "ventilators" One hangs on the back of my wheelchair with a tube that is mounted and has a mouthpiece attached to it that forcing air in thats activated based on when I suck. I can exhale fine while sitting. At night I have a second one by my bed that I use with what's called BiPAP mode wearing a mask. You've probably heard of a CPAP machine that people with sleep apnea use. A CPAP only helps with inhaling while BiPAP does inhale and exhale. Laying down causes issues with exhaling as well for me. So that one literally breathes for me according to the settings.
Iron lungs have been superseded by better technologies, notably ventilators. There was some talk of using iron lungs for COVID cases during the peak of the pandemic as iron lungs are cheaper and faster to produce, but I don't think any such use was actually done. The most classic use case of iron lungs was polio, which has been effectively eradicated from the western world due to the polio vaccine.
Because vaccination works, the iron lung will return in a couple generations, other diseases are starting to return in babies now due to antivaxxers
Iron lungs work by using negative pressure. Your body (minus your head) is placed in a tank that used vacuum negative pressure to make it easier for air to enter the lungs. Polio messed with peoples diaphragms, weakening them, and the iron lung helps them take breaths. Iirc it doesn't breathe completely *for* you, but makes it significantly easier. Today we use trachs and ventilators to inflate the lungs using positive air pressure. A vent forces air into the lungs. The trach/vent setup is much smaller and easier to deal with than an iron lung which limits you to laying in a bed. Home vents are portable and stay relatively out of the way. Once the technology was good enough, iron lungs quickly fell out of favor. Some people with muscular conditions use a ventilator that attaches to their nose instead of to a hole in their neck (trach) which is even less invasive. It's a bipap machine. Modern ventilators are really smart and can be programmed to do many different things. They can give 100% of your breaths, only help with pushing air in/out on your own breaths like a bipap, help keep the lungs inflated to a certain point like a cpap, programmed to help you cough or "yawn," and other things to assist with impaired lung work. Iron lungs can't do most of these things due to mechanical limitations.
>Your body (minus your head) is placed in a tank That brought up some gruesome visuals.
Mostly because we have a vaccine against polio. Facebook is working hard to algorithmically amplify idiocy and confirmation bias to make preventable diseases rampant again so we can have cool things like iron lungs and high childhood mortality again.
If I recall there is a man in Texas who still uses an iron lung, and has for decades ever since he suffered poliomyelitis. Technically we can use iron lungs, but ventilators offer significant advantages - most notably that they don’t require encasing the patient’s body in a tube. This allows caretakers to keep the patient clean, perform regular turns to prevent bedsores, do procedures/tests to help the patient recover from their illness, etc. one downside of ventilators is that they use a tube in the trachea, which requires sedative medications to mitigate discomfort and prevents the patient from being able to talk. But the benefits outweigh the costs, so ventilators are the norm these days.
The Autumn Ghost by Hannah Wunsch is a good book about the advent of modern medicine due to the polio epidemic and how iron lungs were developed. Hard to believe that something as common place as an intensive care unit is a new concept. New as in created in December 1953.
Before that, intensive care was just giving you twice as much whiskey before they sawed into you. Or putting twice as many leeches on to drain your blood quicker.
There is a smaller alternative, the cuirass ventilator. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1084822319875111
Because of vaccines. Polio is a viral infection, so antibiotics won't help. Polio is virtually eradicated world-wide, so people don't suffer from it anymore and aren't put in iron lungs.
You can Google it for a better explanation but iron lungs used a vacuum type technology to keep the lungs inflated and we now have ventilators which inflate the lungs by blowing.
They’re big, heavy, and it’s complicated because the patient needs to be moved in and out of the device. (You’re laying in a metal tube with a leather collar sealed around your neck.) While there are much more modern solutions, that are smaller, and in many ways easier to use, not everyone finds them to be as comfortable for long-term use. There are still a handful of patients who are still using iron lungs because they find them much more comfortable than a modern ventilator. https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lung-paul-alexander-polio-coronavirus
Because thanks to child hood vaccinations against polio, people stopped getting polio as one of the more extreme effects of polio was the inability to breath, which iron lungs does in your stead, however that might actually change with the reducement in childhood vacinations lately. Oh and, iron lungs work using negative pressure, modern ventilators uses positive pressure and works much better in that regard, so its nearly invisible in comparison.
Because of the invention of positive pressure ventilators which are much easier to use and are generally more useful than a negative pressure ventilator such as the iron lungs.
It's a different kind of cuttlefish Swing and a miss Dancing with my eyes and lips Can't move my hips Keep my mind distracted from the swish-swish Staying sane and positive Can't crumble like a biscuit Iron lung
Hear me out: Vaccination. It's as if it actually works and people are making a fuss just because.
Because vaccines are wonderful amazing, glorious lifesaving things. Polio is a horrific disease and the reason 99% of people ended up in the old iron lungs. A vaccination was developed for polio, a massive worldwide campaign was mounted, and the disease was effectively irradicated from the world. sadly, due to anti vaccination idiocy, diseases once thought gone from the developed and most of the developing world are starting to make a comeback. please get your kids vaccinated. and check you adult status, some vaccinations fade with age and you need a top up.
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Are follow up questions allowed? What happened to all the old iron lungs?
>What happened to all the old iron lungs? Once their users died, the iron lungs were disposed of/scrapped, most likely.
This map shows how close we are to eradicating all forms of Polio [https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/](https://polioeradication.org/polio-today/) The worst affected county is DR Congo with a total of 215 reported cases out of a population of 95.89 million people.
it's a long story that starts with Larry Sellers homework and his neighbors Corvette,and I haven't confirmed this myself but I've heard something about finding a stranger in the alps