The novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is aptly named for a reason.
It’s so new that not only are there no vaccines for it, health practitioners are scrambling to understand how it works and how to properly treat those who have been infected by it.
While several pharmaceutical drugs are currently being tested as possible treatments, including remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine, the truth is that the world is just at the beginning of trying to ultimately conquer this disease. Even so, as doctors gain more experience treating COVID-19 patients, they are discovering other ways to manage the disease.
One of these is pronation or putting patients on their stomachs. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective method that helps patients with respiratory difficulties to breathe.
“We have been using pronation for the past weeks and we have seen improvement in [patients’] blood levels of oxygen,” said Dr.point 397 |
Jorge Mercado, associate section chief of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn.point 106 | He added that the method worked both with patients who are on ventilators and those without.point 183 | 1
Mercado explains that when a person is put into pronation, it “recruits other parts of the lung that were not being used effectively, and therefore improves oxygenation.”
According to Kellie Gross, a nurse at Northwell Health Long Island Jewish Medical Center, pronation is actually being used as a last-ditch attempt to avoid putting the most serious patients on a ventilator.
“We actually see a lot of success when we have patients that are desaturating, their oxygen is getting lower when they turn and they lay on their stomach,” she said. “That actually helps rate their oxygen level, moves things around and opens up the lungs a little bit, so when we see a person that doesn’t need to be intubated yet, but their oxygen level is dipping, that is something we try to do.”
At Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, one doctor conducted an informal study that monitored 50 new COVID-19 patients who had low oxygen levels, ranging between 69 and 85 percent or well below 95 percent which is the normal level.point 187 | Dr.point 190 | Nicholas Caputo told The New York Times that just five minutes of pronation was enough to raise patients’ oxygen levels to an average of 94 percent.point 319 |
After 24 hours, three-quarters of the patients were doing so well that a ventilator wasn’t needed.point 89 | This is a big thing because doctors have been steering away from using ventilators as a COVID-19 treatment option.point 185 | 1
For those people who are confirmed or suspected to have COVID-19 and are quarantining at home, Mercado says they can also try the technique although it would be hard to quantify any improvements without instruments to measure them.
Still, the technique is being shared among hospitals as medical professionals struggle to come to grips with the virus.
“It has been a good experience to be able to share what everybody is doing,” says Mercado.
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