Detecting pulmonary aspiration of enteral feeding in intubated patients.

cause it was not our purpose to rectify terminology problems in the field of mechanical ventilation, we intentionally used conventional terms. Mr. Chatburn writes passionately and convincingly concerning others' errors in linguistic accuracy, but in doing so he himself falls victim to errors of other types as well as linguistic errors. For instance, flow and volume are not inverse functions: volume is determined by integrating a flow signal, not inverting it. Furthermore, all of the equations cited in our paper were not derived from the equation of motion-many were derived from Ohm's law. Another point involves the article cited by Mr. Chatburn titled "Consensus Statement on the Essentials of Mechanical Ventilators" (Respir Care 1992; 37:1000-08). This Consensus, which was actually formed among 15 persons, denotes agreement among 8 to 15 people, not agreement of the entire community of professionals who are concerned with these issues. To imply this "Statement" was a general consensus of the entire community is an overstatement. Finally, Mr. Chatburn's statement that " 'preset' implies that the ventilator attempts to achieve a particular value at one point in time, as in preset tidal volume" shows his bias. Our use of the term implies nothing beyond its simple definition: "to set (something, esp the controls of an automatic apparatus) beforehand."' While we did not take any of Mr. Chatburn's comments personally and think that some of his ideas presented elsewhere may have some merit, a more straightforward approach to presenting his ideas may be a better way to stimulate open, rational discussion about them.