BHUBANESWAR: Doctors with years of experience in operating Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine, also called the lung-heart bypass machine, have cautioned relatives of patients that it is not an elixir of life.
While they feel people should not be stopped from availing advanced facilities, but given the financial implications and other medical considerations involved in ECMO support, the senior doctors urged people and healthcare providers to be more judicious.
Since March last year, as many as nine patients from Odisha have been airlifted to centres outside the state in air ambulance facilities to avail ECMO care.
Of that, one patient in May and four this month have been shifted to Chennai and Kolkata for ECMO.
Last year, two doctors had succumbed to post-Covid infections despite being airlifted and put in ECMO support for weeks, involving crores in expenses.
“ECMO shouldn’t be used without evaluation of the patient.
Falling oxygen level and fibrosed lungs shouldn’t be the only yardsticks.
Once put on ECMO, the functioning of patient’s heart and lungs needs constant monitoring as both organs work in synergy.
The risk involved is humongous if not handled by experts with vast experience in the domain.
Apart from anti-coagulants, we have to see that the patient doesn’t get secondary infections,” Dr Ranjan Joshi, head of paediatric critical care for coronovirus pandemic for south-Australia, told TOI.
Dr Joshi has over 15 years of experience in operating ECMO.