RMR - Yes, absolutely would be fantastic if
real,
verifiable health care professionals would take it upon themselves to come up with viable solutions for alternatives to standard hospital ventilation, and come here to help us do what we're attempting to do: provide worst-case scenario protocols for patients to self-treat at home when they have no other alternative, using equipment that most sleep apnea patients already have on hand.
I keep having to repeat my reminder numerous times in this thread, and I understand that since it's a huge thread, but I would remind folks
yet again that we're going
outside what most medical professionals would deem "safe", "standard" or even "proven" when we discuss these things.
But as we've found out for many years here on Apnea Board, most "professionals" are too caught up in the mindset of using standard, existing hospital protocols and procedures for dealing with medical issues, most of which require a full hospital staff and a stockroom full of medical equipment and supplies (as you implied). The vast majority of those professions seem "stuck" into thinking that
anything outside of peer-reviewed studies and "time-tested", modern hospital methodologies equates to introducing an unacceptable risk to patients.
Again, we're talking the equivalent to "ditch medicine" here, for a time when standard hospital treatment becomes unavailable to us.
If you know of any sincere, open-minded health care professional who is willing to prove their honest credentials and help out with this project, by all means have them send an email to me so we can make sure they're not simply another scammer. We've had a few of those types already.
The problem is most of them are closed-minded and can't think outside the box, and even more problematic is that they think that patients cannot provide any form of self-treatment at all unless and until they've gone through the "formal" medical educational institutions first. The people who've been on Apnea Board for years now, know for a fact what I'm talking about. Many "professionals" talk big, tout their degrees and experience and high level of "expertise", when in fact, we KNOW that many of them have less knowledge about CPAP machines than many people who frequently help people on Apnea Board.
Not true in every case, obviously, but those types still belittle our efforts here claiming that "patients should not be adjusting their own CPAP pressure!" or other such nonsense that they know nothing about.
I hope that some medical professionals will prove me wrong, forget about "standard hospital protocols and procedures", and start helping the patients who may be forced to help themselves from home, using only the supplies & equipment they have on-hand. We're tired of hearing that "you can only do this properly in a hospital setting", in other words. That's not what this thread is about. This thread is about self-help, for a time when normal hospital settings become unavailable to us.
Until they forget about what's "normal" and they come here to help us figure out how to get home-based solutions to actually WORK for us, I'm not impressed. Their pleas of "this won't work", or "you can't do stuff like this outside of a hospital" are ridiculous, considering we may be moving into a time period where all of that "standard level of care" will vanish into a thick cloud of a completely overwhelmed medical system.
What we're doing here is
serious business. We don't have time for all the naysayers who say it can't be done. In an emergency, people around the world have rallied together to do great things in the past, in spite of many "professions" or "experts" clamoring about how "it can't be done".