drparenti said:
The American Heart Association has passed guidelines for ordinary citizens that they hope will eliminate the fear of catching something when a bystander decides to try save a stranger’s life. It’s now okay if we don’t do mouth-to-mouth. Whew! The hope is that this will save more lives and there is evidence to support that it just might.
Scientists are calling it “minimally interrupted cardiac resuscitation” (why do they always have to complicate things?). MICR, for short, simply means doing CPR without the P. Researchers in Arizona looked at the survival rates of individuals that received mouth-to-mouth and those that didn’t when CPR was administered by ordinary people. They found that giving mouth-to-mouth didn’t change whether people survived and that doing something is better than doing nothing.
I agree. Eliminating mouth-to-mouth makes perfect sense for a couple of reasons. First, the mechanical compression of the chest alone should move air into and out of the lungs simply due to the pressure differences created by the compressions. And second, since oxygen exhange occurs in the capillaries, anyway, it makes sense that the more blood that can get to the capillaries, (via uninterrupted compressions) the more gas exchange that can occur.
One other thougt involving oxygen and survival is the emerging science surrounding hypothermia for cardiac patients. Recent research seems to be indicating that the rapid delivery of oxygen to a cardiac victim may actually be causing cell death. Therefore some ER doctors are trying a new approach to acute heart patients. They are cooling the body of certain patients and slowly introducing oxygen back into the system. And apparently the survival rate from even the most deadly of heart attacks (the widowmaker, for example) is much higher than doing it the old fashioned way of getting as much oxygen in as quickly as possible.
So, it looks like we should take our breath away the next time we see someone having a heart attack and keep cool. In doing so, we’ll catch less germs and we just might save someone’s life for real.
