What are the most common symptoms of respiratory failure?
The most common symptoms of respiratory failure of course is breathlessness, the feeling that you're sufficating, that you're struggeling with each breathe. We have a term that says the work of breathing. With the term work of breathing what we mean by that is that the work that a person has to put into taking a breath is very minumal. For instance if you look at how much oxegyn you consume per minute, and then allocate each of the ten organ systems with a certain percentage of the consumption of that oxegyn. You'll find that the lung in order to do its job requires about 3 percent of the oxygen that is consumed by minute to work the pumps, and get the oxygen in, and distribute it to the rest of the body.The other organ systems like the brain, and the kidneys, and the heart consume a lot more oxygen than does the machinary in the body that brings in the oxygen. In resporitory failure, that work of breathing starts to decline dramatically. So you may see a patient in resporitory failure that the lung is requiring 25% of the oxygen just to take a breathe and move the air in and out. When that happens that means you're stealing oxygen away from the other systems that are much more used to higher levels of oxygen, and they start to shut down. So that oxygen becomes the sailable component with in this whole system much like a business. Where one part starts to shut down, requires more and more of the resources to run it and after a while it can kill the whole organism. So when the lung goes into resporitory failure, it starts demanding more of the oxygen than it would normally use. That then puts big stresses on other portions of the body such as the hearts ability to contract pump by pump goes down with the lack of oxygen. It needs a lot of oxygen to do its job. If it's not getting it because the lungs are demanding it then it starts to fail, as do the kidneys, as do the brain, and GI tract.
