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Stephen Lurie, MD, PhD

JAMA. 1999;282:2107-2108.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Chicago—If asked to describe a respirator-dependent patient, most physicians will probably imagine a debilitated, immobilized, and sedated person, monitored in an intensive care setting with the usual array of probes, alarms, telemetry, and skilled nursing staff. During the past 10 years, however, tens of thousands of adults and children with neuromuscular diseases, and a small number with emphysema, have pursued productive lives while receiving mechanical ventilation at home.

At the Chest 1999 conference here last month, Allen Goldberg, MD, president of the American College of Chest Physicians, said he remembered a time when children with muscular dystrophy or nocturnal hypoventilation syndrome would spend most of their childhood in the hospital, tethered to a ventilator. With rapidly expanding home ventilator use, these children are now free to lead a nearly normal life; Goldberg said that one of his patients, a respirator-dependent child, recently fell out of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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