The complicated ethics of a life-saving technology.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jramale. Extra-Corpororeal membrane oxygenation, stay with me, can be a lifesaver for patients whose organs have failed.

Ekmo, for short, works by pumping blood out of the body, passing it through a machine where carbon dioxide is removed and oxygen is added,

the blood is then returned to the body.

The Ekmo machine is really doing the work that a healthy person's lungs and heart would normally do.

Many users of the technology can walk, talk, even ride a stationary bike, but they can't leave

the hospital.

Emergency physician Clayton Dalton writes that Ekmo can sometimes land patients

on a bridge to nowhere. He wrote about this for the New Yorker.

Ekmo in and of itself doesn't really fix any problems.

You have to be headed somewhere.

And that either, they could just be recovery, right?

You can put someone on the machine

and let their lungs recover.

That's sort of model that was used during COVID.

Or if they're not going to get better, then you hope that you can get them a transplant.

But you don't know that in advance.

It's hard to know if someone will be eligible for a transplant far in advance, then things can change that could disqualify them.

And it's super hard to know if someone's going to recover on their own or not.

And so it's a bridge. It's a bridge to get you to recovery or to a transplant.

And we just don't know if either of those things will happen when we sort of pull the eczema lever.

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