Hi, I have a parent currently going through this and this is the one thing I really am a little bit confused on.
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Depends on if you’re referring to ECMO as longer-term like heart failure or lung disease vs. cardiac bypass during surgery. They’re the same but also different.
Long-term ECMO: Your heart never stops. You can set up ECMO to bypass the lungs or heart, rarely both. It depends on where the problem is. But in both cases the purpose is to reduce the workload and give the organs time to recover (heart failure, heart attack, heart trauma, asthma, ARDS, etc.). Once they’ve recovered you decrease the level of support and wean the person off of it.
Cardiac bypass during surgery: I’m not a surgeon so I don’t deal with this scenario, and can’t say the heart is stopped during 100% of surgeries. But when it is there are drugs used as well as electricity to shock the heart and get it going again, kind of like what you see in movies. In a worst-case scenario where it doesn’t want to keep going you insert wires to force it to beat, called pacer-wires which may or may not lead to insertion of a permanent pacemaker.
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