In most areas of life, it helps to be tall, and needing treatment for ARDS further proves the rule. Tall people are less likely to get harmful lung-distending tidal volumes during mechanical ventilation, simply by virtue of having bigger lungs. It's bad enough that we intensivists might discriminate against the under-six-feet crowd (of which I am a proud member), but it turns out we aren't very chivalrous, either. In fact, you might say we can be sexist, height-ist brutes.