Face Masks Myths Debunked - Masks Stop You Breathing - Dr James Gill Sprints in 5 Different Masks

hello my name is dr james gill and welcome back to my kitchen um it's been a little while since we filmed in here um but i wanted to try and put this one out relatively rapidly to try and address some conversations i've had with patients over the last few days so i've had some patients asking me about the need to wear face masks and whether or not they can have exemptions for various reasons now there are some patients that do qualify for exemptions from the face mask there are very few respiratory problems that would actually preclude a patient from wearing a face mask and if i'm honest the large majority of medically needed exclusions are due to mental health disorders such as learning difficulties anxiety you know feeling claustrophobia things like that in which case we need to make allowances for those patients but there are a much broader range of patients that are worried about wearing face masks and i have encountered uh some people recently on twitter um and in other social media um fields uh where they've been very what's the phrase i need here very harmful very dangerous spreading misinformation that face masks are bad that you're going to end up with raised calm dark side levels that they will cause fainting and i want to be really clear i am not getting political and i won't engage in that sort of thing what i am getting is scientific because that is what i used to be before i went to medical school before becoming a doctor i did a bsc in animal science and then a masters in immunology analogy so with this whole covert thing i do literally have a working background there but what i want to talk today about is face masks because of the comments that people have said um i've collected a few face masks so we've got my synchro racing power mask from pro which you know very nice very racing yellow with two large filters making it particularly uh useful for sports when you're actually blowing out a large amount of waste gases here we've got a dac filter and there's also a hepa filter with this so this is actually going to be really really effective at filtering out fumes when i'm cycling along as well as giving a considerable degree of protection certainly compared to the other masks here we've got my standard medically provided face mask if i'm honest isn't the best simply goes round your ears and there's nothing there to keep the steam going to your nose if i'm perfectly honest this is one stage slightly better than the buff and this is going to be providing more adequate protection against droplets and spillage we've got the slightly better surgical face mask or with a nose card no less to theoretically prevent um fogging up other glasses i personally prefer to work in these and we're going to be tying it around the back of your head so your ears don't get so irritated and a nice bit of metal to ensure it's conforming to your nose and around your face again not hugely effective against aerosols but it's certainly going to be effective against droplets and providing a degree of protection we've got an older cambridge mask which is washable and has a vent to it we compare that with the two vents that we have on the rest pro mask we've got a single vent on here but the material is apparently washable to extend the life of the mask and we've got a small bit of wire in the top to try and help it stick across your nose and prevent steaming the glasses slightly more effectively and finally we have a piece of cloth or known to many people and branded as a buff nothing particularly fancy here but another this one does have an insect guard to it from my adventures and supposedly protective of hive uv indexes so what we're going to do is um i was going to go for a run hence this get up um and i was going to run up a rather steep hill and check um my pulse sets with an oxygen monitor as we're doing so now this is designed to go on your finger and tell myself as a clinician um how much oxygen is going from your mouth through to your fingertips it's not going to be the best at bouncing around but we're going to try as a second measure we're going to be using a garmin fenix 6x with a pulse oximetry meter built into it pulse oximetry now i've personally used this at everest base camp so i know that it's good in the wilds and whilst this is a relatively new device i see no reason why given it has the certification to talk about pulse oximetry that we can't rely on the data there's some other videos from a really um useful chat called dc rainmaker who's talked more about the pulse ox on the fenix series if you want to dig into that so what we're going to do we're going to go and get to this ridiculous hill i am going to run up and down it in each of these various masks and we're going to have a look how my pulse stats progress across the run to make things fair we're going to make sure that we check my pulse sat and pulse oximetry at the start of the run at the very base and then we'll see if these masks affect my oxygen saturation during the run okay so i'll be perfectly honest one of the reasons why i'm in my sports get up to start off with is that i planned to go out do all the recording and then appropriately record here however it's absolutely bucketing it down so um given i've got only got a short period of time to get this together and i've changed around the orders in which i'm doing things right with that in mind let's get testing do you ever have one of those days when you wish that you'd just not decided to do something well it's now continuing to rain even more um but i'm at the base of the hill and we've got the standard pulse ox set now it's going to be very interesting to see whether or not my cold fingers are affecting the saturate okay so i've got 100 sats at the moment so we're going to run from the top to the bottom and try not to kill myself so on with the rest pro mask first mumble mumble mumble assume i said something very impressive and uh clever definitely right so all of these are done from this first marker okay three two one off we go numbers that's got me at 97. now we're trying to pull up the garmin huh okay just now garmin is at 99 and that is also at 99. well i'm getting far wetter than i well i'm getting far wetter than i intended to be but uh this is showing 99 on 135 the watch has 99 as well okay so we've done uh the synchro mask now it's time for the cambridge mask i'm not the biggest fan of the world of this as you'll see i'm going to steam up quite considerably yes let's pop this on the easiest thing in the world right uh see i'm really not a fan of this mask right okay so that's all on let's shoot these and then we're good to go seriously this one is not a good mask for being outside and being in the colder but my saturation should be okay i can't see that at the minute so bear with me a second oh right so i'm starting all of the uh runs from this post and getting right the way to the top so literally to shoot this one because i can't see anything i've had to take my glasses off and i've got a mask so i can't hold my glasses in my teeth which is what i normally do nobody said masks were easy we're just saying that there's no problem with your saturations those in a moment now my problem is that my fingers are cold see oh there we go 100 100 pulse that does say 100 let's just wipe that off so hopefully you can see it in a better orientation there we go 100 100 and we are definitely wearing the most annoying mask we've got the same there confirmed on the fenix off we go top of the hill hate these masks well at least one benefit of the buff you've got something that you can wipe your glasses with well theoretically actually all the managers smear it remind me whose god idea this was okay now whilst this is going to be the easiest to breathe in i'm certain of that it's certainly the least effective in terms of cover production and personally i think you look the most aggressive in it but that's another issue right so i'm gonna head back to the start and we'll see how we're doing this this is much easier to wear so i'm gonna use this with two layers not one okay so one okay so yeah there you go so we've got two layers on that so hopefully we should do all right now to start off with the buff we're sitting at 99 okay on the bath begin to steam up already and let's bring up the sats so there's our start marker let's go i really hate this hill nice side to side i do not like this when you breathe okay so we've done the respiratory mask we've done the cambridge mask we've done the buff now let's move on to our two surgical masks so i've got the straightforward one here and put that on up around the ears and then pinning it down over the nose it amazes me how many people i see walking around without the nose covered you're still breathing in things through the nose you need to have the whole thing covered including the nose there okay so let's video our sets and things so as my hands are getting wetter it's getting harder to get this thing to pick up a trace there we go i think it's found me yeah there we go numbers are going up now and this is the thing it's very easy to have a picture of somebody showing a low sets and lie and try and get false information but it's very difficult to do it when you're actually on an uncut video okay so let's have another run for what it's worth physically running in these paper masks is much less hard work than on the buff i really didn't like how that was going into mouthful so here's a hot tip to improve the fitness he'll repeat in a mask 133 and that idea still wearing this thing much much better for running in than either of the two masks but it does provide less protection right last one all right so final one now we're doing the surgical mask which is actually my preference to work in it's much more comfortable but uh i'm glad it's the final one because i'm wet and cold and hungry and don't like it and moaning and i'm going to stop now let's give this one a go right behind oh i dropped the pulse meter and that's expensive okay one two i'm seriously uh steaming up already all right let's see if this is completely broken let's take the glasses off too oh got a baseball cap on there we go it lives okay so i'm dropping everything today not scratched okay so on with the finger pulse out with the phone so i'm going to go from the start okay 105 and so right from the get-go but i want to show a good trace there so it's one thing people showing you pictures of bad sets but it's quite another than giving you a lot you know a rolling video of their saturations as they're wearing the mask okay right with that note let's go for the run okay now i use the raspberry mask a lot to cycle to work and it's great for protecting me from um you know fumes and cars and things like that but this is much much more comfortable to run in but i can feel it against soggy already so whereas i've had that respro mask over a year and i just replaced the filters still wearing the mask so i figured this thing out so that's the conclusion you need masks don't affect your saturations particularly not even running up that hill [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you