eli5: Why do Heart-Lungs bypass machine can’t keep someone alive for more than days?
In: 155
A couple things to keep in mind:
1. Anyone on one of these machines is extremely sick and inevitably has a lot more problems than just this process
2. Complications from the meds/process of the ecmo itself as others have pointed out
3. There is not much utility in just keeping someone’s body ‘alive’ unless there is an end point—some intervention that you can do to actually fix the underlying issue that caused them to need to go on the machine in the first place.
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