A minority continued to improve the

A minority continued to improve the technique. Others worked on modifying other aspects of the support of respiratory failure patients. Clinicians understood that lungs were being damaged by mechanical ventilation with positive pressure. Methods to decrease this mechanical insult were developed. The so-called protective ventilation strategies are in fact the least-damaging lung ventilation techniques. One promising method was to combine therapies using ECMO to remove carbon dioxide (CO2)to reduce the amount of ventilation required wit ventilation. However, there was no evidence in comparative studies that using ECMO led to better ourcome than conventional therapy.