Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MercTech Ok.. back to the comment about lowering the bar. It doesn't matter if you lower the bar. You are not actually saving any lives with CPR. You're extending the timeframe in which it might be saved. Loss of respiration will cause cardiac arrest, so ignore the presence of a pulse unless you are an ER nurse or doctor, or the patient starts breathing again. Try to clear the airway if you have reason to suspect it may be obstructed. Make sure to call 911 right away, which gets the EMTs on site as fast as possible. They are the ones who will try to save the patient's life. After cessation of spontaneous breathing, the body can go without ventilation for 4 minutes without risk of brain damage, and heavy brain damage or fatal loss of cardiac function is unlikely before 6 minutes have passed. This means you should not spend more time than what it takes to administer one test breath (to check the airway), unless drowning is involved, or the 911 operator tells you the EMTs will take more than 4 minutes to get to the scene. They will have bag ventilators or oxygen tanks, both of which are superior to the partial pressure of oxygen provided by rebreathing. The less time you waste, the more time they will have to use those ventilators. After cessation of circulation, loss of consciousness occurs after 15 seconds, give or take. Time to permanent brain damage is measured in seconds, although it's like 2-3 digits. Death is assured in minutes, and that is presently an irreversible condition. So, yeah. Please keep the bar low. You really want rapid response. Long term or high quality CPR makes very little difference. Rapid response and good perfusion are the keys. That, and getting EMTs on site quickly. Health, al-Aswad. P.S.: The accuracy of non-ER nurses trying to determine the presence or absence of a pulse in an emergency is on-par with a coin flip. This has been verified on nurses in a thorough study up here, done in connection with quality assurance on the national guidelines for emergency medical care and civilian life saving courses (including basic CPR courses, of course). The course surveyed nurses in many locations, iirc, including my local hospital (about 50K people). P.P.S.: Some exceptions apply with hypothermia. Sometimes.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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