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Post by gato on Mar 7, 2021 7:23:06 GMT -5
It seems logical: someone has collapsed with a heart attack and you happen to have a stun gun in your pocket. So ... ZAP! You're welcome! Send me a thank you card when you're feeling better.
"It’s common to confuse a heart attack with cardiac arrest, but these are completely different conditions with different protocols. A heart attack is a plumbing issue while cardiac arrest is an electrical issue. An external defibrillator will not help a heart attack victim; on the contrary, it may put them in greater danger.
The good news is that it’s easy to tell the difference between a heart attack and cardiac arrest. If the person is in pain but still breathing and responsive, it’s most likely a heart attack. If the person is unresponsive and not breathing, you’re probably dealing with cardiac arrest."
A typical stun gun delivers 20,000+ volts, but only 0.3 joules, (at 00.45 amps) where a defib shocks with 200-1,000 volts and 360 joules (at 15 amps). Think of it as the push starting of a car by a guy in a wheelchair, vs the vehicle being pushed by the Terminator.
But the high voltage via stun gun, could conceivably do a number on someone's pacemaker. Someone in the wrong category of heart difficulty could be done a lot of damage with the well meant Taser jolt.
I'm sure there are medical folks on board here, who can add or subtract to my thought experiment about something that seems logical, isn't necessarily so.
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 7, 2021 9:20:54 GMT -5
I'm not a doctor of medicine (well...not officially certificated  ) but I know enough about this stuff to add some elucidating information, and I've saved three people with CPR. Never used a defib but I've been trained on 'em. In a cardiac arrest response you have an almost 100% chance of killing a person faster when randomly shocking them with any electrical device other than a real-deal defibrillator. So if you have no defib handy, put down those jumper cables and get to the CPR. The reason is how the heart uses electrical signals to activate the atria and ventricles: the timing of the shock has to be precise or you'll merely aggravate the problem. A defibrillator has an automatic trigger that fires in response to its built-in monitoring system. It tracks the heart pulses and delivers the shock at the proper time to re-sync the contractions. Up until about 20 years ago, many electricians that died on the job were not killed outright by being electrocuted. They died minutes later of a shock that caused their heart to mildly fibrillate (the shock made the signals go out of sync), and they simply felt stunned or winded. So they sat down to catch their breath, lit a cigarette to relax, and then passed away while having a smoke. |
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Post by gato on Mar 7, 2021 9:27:45 GMT -5
Peegoo, I knew I could count on you to "take it to the next level."
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Post by Peegoo 🏁 on Mar 7, 2021 12:07:30 GMT -5
With me--I don't know if that's a compliment!
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009
Wholenote
Take me to your leader!
Posts: 522
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Post by 009 on Mar 7, 2021 12:56:23 GMT -5
I received this email from a friend the other day, Re: Self-administered CPR...
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Don't know if this works but I figure with only 10 seconds left, what the hell do I have to lose?
This comes from Dr. Patrick Teefy, Cardiology Head at the Nuclear Medicine Institute University Hospital, London Ont.
I hope everyone can send this on as it is really important for everyone to know!
1. Let's say it's 7:25 pm and you're going home (alone of course) after an unusually hard day on the job.
2. You're really tired, upset and frustrated.
3. Suddenly you start experiencing severe pain in your chest that starts to drag out into your arm and up into your jaw. You are only about five km from the hospital nearest your home.
4. Unfortunately you don't know if you'll be able to make it that far.
5. You have been trained in CPR, but the guy that taught the course did not tell you how to perform it on yourself.
6. HOW TO SURVIVE A HEART ATTACK WHEN ALONE?
Since many people are alone when they suffer a heart attack without help, the person whose heart is beating improperly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness.
7. However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously.
A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest.
A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let-up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again.
8. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating. The squeezing pressure on the heart also helps it to regain a normal rhythm.
In this way, heart attack victims can get help or to a hospital.
9. Tell as many other people as possible about this. It could save their lives!
10. A cardiologist says: "If everyone who gets this email & kindly sends it to 10 people, you can bet that we'll save at least one life.
11. Rather than sending jokes, please contribute by forwarding this email which can save a person's life....
12. If this message comes around to you ..... more than once..... please don't get irritated.... We all need to be happy that we have many friends who care about us and we are being reminded of how to tackle... Heart attacks.... when we are alone.
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Post by FlyonNylon on Mar 7, 2021 13:08:51 GMT -5
yeah a taser, car battery, or live wire is unlikely to provide the energy to depolarize the heart and allow normal electrical function to resume.
The BLS/ACLS algorithms are pretty good at explaining appropriate treatment of cardiac arrest. Basically the best thing you can do as a single provider is call 911 asap then push on their chest hard and fast. 100-120bpm with 2inches chest recoil and minimal to no breaks. Every second that you aren't pushing in their chest you lose perfusion pressure (ie, oxygen to brain). brain cells die fast (5 min) which is why out of hospital cardiac arrest has very low survival rate. Forget the makeshift electrical devices.
The most bad-a way to resolve pulseless vtach or vfib would be the "precordial thump" ie "five-fingered punch of life". Ie, watch someone go pulseless then immediately strike the center of their chest with a closed fist. Rarely works but actually is a medical thing and is thought to deliver 5-10 joules along with some "coronary artery massage"
What Peegoo describes is synchronized cardioversion. This is used for unstable arrhythmias like hypotensive afib w rvr, vtach with a pulse, refractory SVT, etc. Basically the patient has a fast arrhythmia and is awake but not looking good. You synchronize the shock with the beginning of the QRS complex (spike on ekg) to prevent the "R on T phenomenon" which can result in asystole (flat line) or more unstable rhythm.
Defibrillation (what you usually see on TV) actually is not synchronized. So when someone is in vfib/vtach without a pulse, basically dead, you don't synchronize because you want all the heart cells to be depolarized to allow normal function to resume. This is only used in pulseless vtach or vfib and NOT used in PEA/asystole, which is a different type of cardiac arrest that does not respond to electrical treatment.
But yeah if you watch someone go unresponsive the best thing you can do is, check for breathing, check pulse, if none present, call 911 and provide continuous high quality CPR until the person asks you to stop or help arrives.
Also please make sure the person is actually unresponsive. Not uncommon to see little old ladies from facilities come in after falling asleep at the breakfast table with a well meaning worker immediately doing CPR, which obviously awakens the unfortunate patient who asks the worker to please stop, then develops chest pain due to multiple rib fractures. Good CPR in older people will almost always break ribs which have a pretty high mortality rate on their own so make sure meemaw ain't just sleeping before you get all excited.
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) but I know enough about this stuff to add some elucidating information, and I've saved three people with CPR. Never used a defib but I've been trained on 'em.
