Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation in acute respiratory distress syndrome: does it really help?

The concept of extracorporeal life support had been credited to Dr. Gibbon (1903 to 1973) as he described in a patient that suffered from a massive pulmonary embolism “… if it were possible to remove continuously some of the blue blood … put oxygen into that blood and allow carbon dioxide to escape from it, and then inject continuously the now-red blood into the patient’s arteries, we might have saved her life” (1).