Stayin’ Alive
The most effective rate for chest compressions is 100 compressions per minute – the same rhythm as the beat of the BeeGee’s [sic] song, “Stayin’ Alive.”
This afternoon, I went through CPR/AED recertification at work. An automated external defibrillator, or AED, is a device that essentially “reboots” a human heart by delivering a powerful electric shock when it detects the kind of irregular activity that causes a heart to stop pumping. I first learned how to use an AED two years ago, when the university where I work began placing the devices in buildings throughout the campus. Today, it was time for me to take a refresher course on what to do when someone goes cold quicker than an investment bank.
While AEDs are becoming far more commonplace, appearing in schools, airports, and all federal buildings, I’m guessing that most people still don’t know how to use them, or even where to find them. (Why is there no standard for AED placement, like putting it next to a restroom? That would certainly make it easy to find in a public setting.) This contrasts with the instructions we are given during training, in which we’re told to ask a specific bystander to get an AED.
During training, I felt compelled to press the point: What if that particular person has no idea WTF an AED is?
Our instructor reassured us that a surprisingly high number of people know about AEDs; I think he was soft in the head and spends day after day exposed to a skewed sample — namely, people who are signed up to receive AED training.
Why am I so jaundiced in my view? Well, let’s see: when someone like veteran broadcast journalist Tim Russert drops to the floor in the NBC newsroom, surrounded by people whose business it is to know what’s going on in the world, and begins receiving immediate CPR, and they actually have an AED in the building, and they don’t get it on him until the EMS crew shows up with their own AED, and Russert dies from the very condition (ventricular fibrillation) that an AED can address but CPR can’t…well, let’s just say I’m less than entirely confident that a random person in a crowd will do anything but freeze if someone points at them and says, “YOU! Get an AED, right now!”
It doesn’t help that recommendations for exactly how to carry out CPR have been skipping around like an arrhythmic heartbeat. When I was a teenager, every single student in my school was trained (and tested) in performing CPR as part of our mandatory health class, leading to years of jokes about feeling around for young ladies’ xyphoid processes. In those days, it was 15:2 — fifteen chest compressions, two breaths, and it remained that way when I was recertified in CPR by the Red Cross about twelve years ago.
Then they moved the numbers around. The instructions we received two years ago during my first AED training were to stick with 30:2 — thirty chest compressions to two breaths. But the American Heart Association is going even further, now advocating that untrained bystanders skip the mouth-to-mouth altogether and just continue chest pumping until help arrives.
Ten years from now, this won’t be a problem. We’ll have settled on a resuscitation standard, and most people will know what and where AEDs are. But it’s probably good to try and refrain from going into cardiac arrest between now and then, just in case.
