Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell, who was treating critically ill coronavirus patients at Maimonides Medical Center in New York, says "Covid-19 is not a pneumonia and should not be treated as one"
By Chris Kitching
Mirror
April 18, 2020
An American doctor says ventilators are doing more harm than good and damaging the lungs of coronavirus patients based on how they're currently being used.
Medics in the UK and around the world have been using the breathing machines, which pump the lungs to send oxygen into the bodies, as a vital tool to keep critically ill patients alive.
But Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell, who was treating Covid-19 patients in New York, said high pressure is inadvertently causing harm and his beliefs have led him to step down from his position in an intensive care unit.
In a YouTube video, he says: "I fear this misguided treatment will lead to a tremendous amount of harm in a very short time. Covid-19 is not a pneumonia and should not be treated as one."
He has said that Covid-19 lung disease "is not a pneumonia” but appears to be “some kind of viral-induced disease most resembling high altitude sickness".
He added: “It is as if tens of thousands of my fellow New Yorkers are on a plane at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure is slowly being let out.
“These patients are slowly being starved of oxygen... and while they look like patients absolutely on the brink of death, they do not look like patients dying of pneumonia.”
The danger, he said, lies in the amount of pressure used to open the lungs, and he believes ventilators should be programmed "differently" for patients with coronavirus.
Dr Kyle-Sidell, a physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, said "we are putting breathing tubes in people and putting them on ventilators and dialing up the pressure to open up their lungs".
He added: “I’ve talked to doctors all around the country and it is becoming increasingly clear that the pressure we’re providing may be hurting their lungs, that it is highly likely that the high pressures we’re using are damaging the lungs of the patients we are putting the breathing tubes in."
He later told WebMd’s Medscape website that his beliefs led him to “step down from my position in the ICU".
He said in that interview earlier this month: "We ran into an impasse where I could not morally, in a patient-doctor relationship, I could not continue the current protocols which again, are the protocols at the top hospitals in the country.
“So now I’m back in the ER where we are setting up slightly different ventilation strategies.”
Dr Kyle-Sidell said medics on the front line of the Covid-19 crisis should change their protocols for using ventilators.
He added: “Covid-positive patients need oxygen. They do not need pressure.
“They will need ventilators - but they must be programmed differently.”
In another video, he said the new strain of coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, "does not make sense to us" because "our usual treatment does not work".
He added: “Some are questioning whether this is a lung disease causing blood problems or a blood disease causing lung problems.
“I don’t know what it is, but I know that I have never seen it before. People are dying of a disease we don’t understand, thousand of people, old and young, and yes, there are young people dying.”
A number of people in the medical industry have said they agree with Dr Kyle-Sidell's beliefs.James Cai, a physician assistant who was the first confirmed coronavirus patient in the state of New Jersey, told the New York Post: “It all makes sense why experts in China told me to use oxygen to sleep no matter what and use it whenever I needed during the day.
“We need all the researchers to take very close to this disease and don’t just follow the paradigm of how to treat PNA [pneumonia/ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome].”
He added: “It is a new disease and none of the American doctors have encountered it in their lives, not in textbook and they are figuring things out by experience."
Dr David Farcy, head of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, told NBC News: "I’ve never seen anything like this. This has challenged every dogma, has channelled every belief, has challenged anything I’ve studied."
He said his first coronavirus patient had blood oxygen levels so low that he was amazed the person could speak lucidly.
Dr Farcy gave the patient high levels of oxygen and turned him on his side and then his chest.
The man's blood oxygen quickly returned to safe levels, he added.
Dr Farcy said: "I'm not saying patients don’t need ventilators, I’m saying we’re trying to limit the patient and use alternative therapy.
"Some of them do extremely well" but "some of them require ventilation, but at least we are limiting that intubation."
Many coronavirus patients who are put on ventilators do not survive due to various reasons.
Britain's Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre said a study looked at 98 patients who were put on them or on similar equipment.
Of those, two-thirds died.
Eighty per cent of ventilated patients in New York - the worst-affected region in the US - failed to recover.
Dr Farcy said "catastrophic" data from China and Europe shows 50 per cent to 80 per cent of those intubated die.
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