Well, CPR by itslef only helps in a small amount of cases. However, early CPR is absolutely critical for the survival of a patient in cardiac arrest. The CPR keeps tissue, especially cardiac and brain tissue, perfused until defibrillation and/or ACLS is available.
From
St. Urho
Paramedic
As a paramedic, would you say that the half hour of attempted revival was hindered by “CPR refusal”?
If he was alive for a half hour before death, what could have changed things? Was Snead capable of saving his life?
If the patient was “potentially revivable” from 2:15 to 2:52, what does that say about the patient’s health prior to the incedent?
EMTs were aiding the decedent less than 10 minutes after his attack, can anyone ask for much more?
Umm, yeah fuckin’ right.
First, CPR alone for a medical cardiac arrest derived from an MI or whatever is extremely unlikely to be able to effectively cardiovert a cardiac arrest from ventricular fibrilation or whatever. Second, if the complaint is accurate in stating that Claude had a heart beat, then Snead shouldn’t have been performing chest compressions.
This will be a complex case involving a lot of evidence, and the cop in question may well prove to be an enormous asshole, but I sincerely doubt that he killed anyone.
Well, there’s not enough medical information in the linked articles to say for certain. In general, though, brain tissue will survive 6-8 minutes without oxygen. Once any of this brain tissue dies, it’s not coming back. Therefore, it’s crucial to maintain perfusion (through CPR). IME, if there’s no CPR in progress before we get there, the patient will not survive to hospital discharge.
I’m not sure about your middle two questions, can you clarify them for me?
Lastly, with no CPR for 10 minutes, he basically had no chance. From the above American Heart Association link
Umm, I’m not real sure how I missed threemae’s post, but my info assumes that the victim was in fact in cardiac arrest at the time.
Errrm, maybe I’m missing something huge here or everyone has just taken this for granted, but even if he was HIV+, you can’t catch HIV from mouth-to-mouth contact right?
No, you cannot.
Unless you decided that mouth to mouth on someone with halitosis that bad needed a proper clean-up first. And then you decided that the only polite thing to do would be to brush your teeth as well first. Really hard so that you were both bleeding. And then you paused your mouth to mouth for some good-old-fashioned spit swapping that made it look like porn-snowballing was going out of fashion. And you repeated this twice daily for years and years. Then there would be a slight risk of HIV transmission.
But I don’t really expect that a cop that thinks, “all dem’ queers got AYDS!” will be up to the fine points of HIV transmission risk behaviors.
Precisely.
threemae, genuine non-combative question, why do first aid kits include assisted breathing apparatus, and why do first aid instructors insist that we use this apparatus?
A quote from my father who used to teach CPR is pretty instructive, I think: In order for someone to qualify for being a recipient of CPR, they’ve met the minimum requirement for being dead, i.e. no heartbeat.
This isn’t meant to say that CPR is useless, just that when you do it properly, any damage you do to the body is not going to make things worse, and may be able to help. (How far worse do you get from dead, after all?)
Having said that, if the allegations in the suit are accurate, that idiot needs to be taken away from any position where he could be a first responder. Hell’s bells, you’re more likely to recieve a BBP transmission working on accident victims, extracting them from wrecks, than you are giving CPR. And even there, it’s a very low-level risk.
Abbie, thanks for the call for sanity. I was about the join the lynch mob, myself. If the suit is upheld, then we can start tar and feathering this guy in effigy. But, yeah, facts would be best to have before we do that.
The truth, as I heard it the last time I took a CPR course, was that those devices were there to keep people from using the reasoning assigned to the Police Chief in the OP’s story to avoid giving first aid to victims. Not from any real concern about HIV. AIUI, Hepatitis A (And B, to a lesser extent.) however, is susceptible to transmission via spit. This is not to imply that Hep A or B are good things to get. But they are not the automatic death sentence that HIV have been percieved to be ten years ago.
I’m trained in CPR and first aid, and while there’s no way you could get me to do CPR or first aid without the proper equipment, I think if these guys had the mask and gloves and didn’t do something, they’re shitheels.
Gay, straight, friend or stranger, I’m not contacting someone’s bodily fluids without protective gear. Not because I fear that they have HIV, but because I don’t know what they have.
There’s a lot of if in this story, however. If they had protective gear, shame on them. If the guy who was doing CPR wanted to do so without protective gear, then Bowman shouldn’t have stopped him. If neither had protective gear and neither wanted to do CPR without it, then it’s a shame but it’s the smart thing to protect themselves because you never know what a person, any person regardless of sexual orientation, might have that’s contagious or communicable.
One more thought, sorry for the double post, but I just thought of something else.
When you’re doing rescue breathing on someone, they have a tendency to vomit if air gets into their stomach (which it usually does). If your mouth is attached to their mouth, and they vomit, guess where the vomit goes?
It’s not just swapping spit that’s going to be an issue. I really, really don’t want someone vomitting in my mouth.
All things considered, use the protective gear. If none exists, evaluate your own risk and what you’re willing to have coming at you in terms of germs, puke, and blood. I don’t fault anyone who doesn’t dive right in without gloves and masks.
Thanks catsix and OtakuLoki. One more question, what is AIUI?
As I Understand It
Bwaaaahahahah…jeeeez, that’s got to be the dumbest question I’ve asked in a long time.
:smack:
Charleston may well be a world away from many of y’all. McDowell County (Welch) is a world away from Charleston. It’s always an eye opener whenever I visit there.
One thing doesn’t add up for me. If the police chief had a thing against gays and assumed that gays have hiv, he would most likely have assumed that Snead, a companion, was gay as well. Two homosexuals involved in exchanging bodily fluids would not be an issue for him at all.
And that’s why we consider CPR to be a sefless act of altruism to be performed only in emergency situations, rather than a relaxing way to kill some time and meet new people.
So you would fault me for not performing CPR without mask and gloves?