Okay, welcome my name is Devine. This is episode 319 of the Devine

Intervention Podcasts and in today's podcast we will be continuing our

pulmonary path of physiology series. This is series number 10.

Again the goal of this series is to help you really understand pominology.

Pominology is a soldier that many people just mightily struggle with.

They don't really understand it and unfortunately many resources just don't really explain things and explain them well.

So I decided to break the subject up into bite-sized pieces that can just be really accessible to most people so let's continue

So the last thing that we met we talked about I think I left off of this concept of FIO2 that you need to think about you know and we said that

atmospheric pressure is 760 millimeters of mercury.

And we said that approximately 21% of that is oxygen, right?

That's about 150 millimeters of mercury, approximately.

And then we said as you go to a higher elevation, the atmospheric pressure goes down.

So let's see, it drops from 760 to 700. I just kind of think of it this way.

You know, pressure is a measure of force exerted over a given area, right?

I just kind of think of it as you go to a higher elevation, you are supporting less weight of air.

So let's say you are at 1,000 feet, You're supporting more of a weight of air, more force than if you're at 10,000 feet. Well, there's that 9,000 feet of air that you don't have to carry. So atmospheric pressure decreases as you go to higher elevations.

So since atmospheric pressure is plummeting,

it would then make sense that the 21% of that lower number should give you less oxygen, right?

So we said that, you know, as you go to higher elevations, there's less oxygen in the atmosphere,

but it's still 21% of what you're seeing.

And then I said that you should be especially careful

with ventilators, right?

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