The Defibrillator thing is very misleading. Yes, a Defibrillator alone cannot restart a heart. You need to do CPR and if you can combine it with a Defibrillator (operated by a doctor or an AED) you actually have a chance of reviving someone (obviously there is no 100% success rate and the person needs to be “freshly” dead).
Yeah but this is referencing the movie trope where the person has a fully stopped heart and they shock it back to life. In reality applying cpr is just keeping the blood pumping to supply the brain with oxygen in the hope the body restarts the heart itself.
That’s why modern defib machines check the nerve impulses to see if shocking it would help. Of there is no heartbeat, it won’t help and will refuse to shock. Once the body restarts the heart but the rhythm isn’t correct shocking can help.
The shocks also aren’t huge shocks where the person violently lurches up and putting in more energy won’t help either. The machine checks the rhythm and applies a series of shocks to help the nerves regain their normal pattern and thus tell the heart to pump in the right sequence and speed. Just randomly zapping will probably do more harm than good.
It’s pretty nice the emergency defib machines we have all over the place these days are smart enough to help without needing to know how it does their thing. Because 80s and 90s TV and movies have muddied the water quite a bit.
The movies usually show an asystole being defibrillated and that is not done. To the best of my very limited medical knowledge you first need to use CPR and medication to get some electric activity from the heart to defibrillate.
The Defibrillator thing is very misleading. Yes, a Defibrillator alone cannot restart a heart. You need to do CPR and if you can combine it with a Defibrillator (operated by a doctor or an AED) you actually have a chance of reviving someone (obviously there is no 100% success rate and the person needs to be “freshly” dead).
Yeah but this is referencing the movie trope where the person has a fully stopped heart and they shock it back to life. In reality applying cpr is just keeping the blood pumping to supply the brain with oxygen in the hope the body restarts the heart itself. That’s why modern defib machines check the nerve impulses to see if shocking it would help. Of there is no heartbeat, it won’t help and will refuse to shock. Once the body restarts the heart but the rhythm isn’t correct shocking can help. The shocks also aren’t huge shocks where the person violently lurches up and putting in more energy won’t help either. The machine checks the rhythm and applies a series of shocks to help the nerves regain their normal pattern and thus tell the heart to pump in the right sequence and speed. Just randomly zapping will probably do more harm than good.
It’s pretty nice the emergency defib machines we have all over the place these days are smart enough to help without needing to know how it does their thing. Because 80s and 90s TV and movies have muddied the water quite a bit.
The movies usually show an asystole being defibrillated and that is not done. To the best of my very limited medical knowledge you first need to use CPR and medication to get some electric activity from the heart to defibrillate.