A Brooklyn doctor is warning that critically ill coronavirus patients are being inadvertently harmed by the very same breathing machines being used to keep them alive.
In a video posted on YouTube, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell, an emergency medicine physician at Maimonides Medical Center, said that “we are putting breathing tubes in people and putting them on ventilators and dialing up the pressure to open up their lungs.”
“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 said in a two-minute video he posted Wednesday.
Kyle-Sidell, who’s board-certified in emergency medicine, didn’t return a message from The Post, but he told WebMd’s Medscape website that his beliefs led him to “step down from my position in the ICU.”
“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,” he said in a video interview posted Monday.
“So now I’m back in the ER where we are setting up slightly different ventilation strategies.”
In his Wednesday YouTube video, Kyle-Sidell described the situation involving the ventilator settings as “not our fault.”
“We didn’t know. This is how we treat ARDS [acute respiratory distress syndrome]. This is how we’ve treated it for the last 20 years,” he said in the video.
But Kyle-Sidell insisted that “we need to change those protocols” and cautioned that “the time for us to change them is rapidly diminishing.”
“COVID-positive patients need oxygen. They do not need pressure,” he said.
“They will need ventilators — but they must be programmed differently.”
In another video posted Sunday, Kyle-Sidell described COVID-19 as “a disease that does not make sense to us — a disease for which our usual treatment does not work.”
“Some are questioning whether this is a lung disease causing blood problems or a blood disease causing lung problems,” he said.
“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.”
Kyle-Sidell has also said that “COVID-19 lung disease, as far as I can see, is not a pneumonia” but seems to be “some kind of viral-induced disease most resembling high altitude sickness.”
“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,” he said in a video posted Tuesday.
“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.”
James Cai, a physician assistant who was New Jersey’s first coronavirus patient, told The Post that he agreed with Kyle-Sidell’s observations and conclusions, based on his own experience in beating the deadly disease.
“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,” he said via text message.
“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.”
Cai noted that the “muscle of the lung in ARDS patient doesn’t work properly but muscle in COVID-19 patient works just fine. So [a] ventilator is actually doing more harm to [the] lung when it happens.”
“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!” he added.
“They really need help because thousands of thousands [of] Americans’ lives are on the line!”
Maimonides didn’t immediately return a request for comment.