This showed up in my InBox today, can this REALLY work? It claims to have come from -
Health Cares, Rochester General Hospital via Chapter 240’s newsletter AND THE BEAT GOES ON…reprinted The Mended Hearts, Inc. Publication, Heart Response.
Let’s say it’s 6:15pm and you’re driving home (alone of course) after an unusually hard day on the job. You’re really tired, upset and frustrated. Suddenly, you start experiencing severe pain in your chest that starts to radiate out into your arm and up into your jaw. You are only about five miles from the hospital nearest your home; unfortunately, you don’t know if you’ll be able to make it that far. What can you do? You’ve been trained in CPR but the guy that taught the course neglected to tell you how to
perform it on yourself. {Since many people are alone when they suffer a heart attack, this article seemed in order.} Without help the person whose heart stops beating properly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness. 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 repeated about every two seconds without let up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again. 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 regain normal rhythm. In this way, heart attack victims can get to a phone and, between breaths, call for help.
CPR, by definition, can not be performed on oneself.
And if someone is experiencing a myocardial infarction, CPR is incredibly unlikely to “restart” the heart or make it beat in a “normal rhythm.” You need a defibrillator or drugs or other drastic means to do restore a normal rhythm to a severely ischemic heart.
Like what Greenbean said, if the heart is out of rhythm, then you need drugs or electricity, not CPR. When you are asystole (flat line) you need CPR, and many other things like a will and a young priest and an old priest…etc. Yet, when you are flat line, you cannot perform self-CPR because you are clinically dead. How’s that grab ya!
On the other hand, some forms of cardiac arrhythmia such as SVT can possibly be reversed by the vagal stimulation of the Valsalva manoevre, where you inhale deeply and raise your abdominal pressure. It works once in a blue moon, of course I’d rather rely on the Verapamil…
This is not CPR of course it’s just a treatment for a usually non-fatal arrhythmia.
If you’ve arrested and gone into VF, no amount of coughing will produce a significant enough increase in chest pressure to continue sufficient circulation to prevent unconsciousness. CPR on an arrested patient actually involves a lot of effort on the part of the person doing the cardiac compressions. I usually pass the job on to someone else after 5 minutes.
Dreamworks is not entirely correct by the way, ventricular fibrillation is still a dysrhythmia but there is no effective circulatory output as a result so CPR is required while the defibrillator, drugs etc are being readied/administered.
Normal rhythm can reestablish itself spontaneously but it’s rare.
I had my doubts, but I my next physical is not until this fall before I could ask my Dr. I didn’t think to look it up at Snoopes. Thanks for The Straight Dope!
I have a heart problem where once in a while my heart will start beating incredibly fast (300+ bpm) and I have to lay down before I faint. If I do nothing, it can last an hour or more. However, I’ve learned over the years that if I lay down and then take a REALLY deep breath and hold it, usually my heart will pop back into place. Doesnt’ work while I’m standing though – only laying down.
Crazy, huh? Doctors have told me that it makes sense, but it still seems pretty wacky to me. I wish they could just tell me what was wrong in the first place. I’ve had a ton of EKGs, but never one during an attack, so they have no clue.
** meara **, the reason why your heart beat slows after holding a deep breath was hinted at by pennys.
To explain more fully: When you hold a deep breath, or strain against a closed throat (like when you’re taking a big dump, or “popping” your ears to equalise pressure), you increase the pressure inside your chest. This then compresses the large-bore, low-pressure vena cavae that are returning blood to your heart, hence restricting the ability of the heart to adequately fill. When venous return to the heart drops off, so does cardiac output, and your blood pressure falls as a consequence. Receptors in the aorta react by stimulating the heart to beat faster and harder, to bring the BP back up. When you release your breath, the system recognises an excess of BP, so the vagal nerve is stimulated into slowing the heart down again.
Of course all this takes place fairly quickly, and the inhibitory effect that you have noted is utilised by cardiac specialists as a therapeutic tool to combat runs of tachycardia such as those you experience.
And to comment on the first post: the movement of blood achieved during CPR is now considered to occur not because the heart is being squeezed, but because of the compression-release action of raised intrathoracic pressure on the large bore blood vessels in the chest, particularly the vena cavae.
I apologize. You are correct about the need for CPR and defib. I should know, I have done it plenty of times, with nary the success rate of those TV shows. I stand corrected.
