On the Mr. Bean movie, Mr. Bean does that and is sent flying up in the air due to an electric shock. Now, in real life - what would happen if a doctor was dumb enough to do that?
I don’t think anything will happen.
Modern defibs are smart enough to know that you are not placing the paddles correctly.
Right. They will sense that they are correctly placed on the body before firing. Don’t know with the manually activated units but I don’t think you would get a shock if you’re holding onto the safety handles, and a fuse or breaker would blow. Maybe those would sense the short and not fire either.
We call that machine a ‘clear thing’ at our house.
When correctly applied, it’s the patient who goes flying up in the air.
Otherwise, it’s like crossing the beams.
Its not a question about the defib being “smart”.
Well “current limitted” is probably the basic explanation, the defib won’t try to deliver infinite current, besides which the total energy stored for one shot is the limit, its not going to exceed that with a short circuit… , and that isn’t a large amount of energy, so the defib device doesn’t have to have a heat sink for the case of short circuit. (it could say, dump water onto a heat sink, so as to remove heat into the water vapor…)
Why is anyone asking ?
Is the human body just like a resistor , is it even as simple as the element in a hotplate or light bulb ? No. Its quite complicated… to the defib, its more of a short circuit ANYWAY.
Does the human body conduct electricity ? Well yes and no …
No for low voltage. The skin and fat is enough to stop it … and it presents a very very high resistance to low voltages.
But the defib produces enough voltage… it may well work as a current source… but the voltage is limitted to some range on top of the current source behaviour.
Then voltage * current * time will be rather small in terms of Joules… no huge amount of heat produced.
Umm…
No.
Defibs ARE smart:
AND… Modern defibrillators generally don’t have paddles. They use disposable sticky pads.
Yeah, I’ve been trained on how to use an AED. The training mostly consisted of “hook it up and then follow the directions the device gives you”.
Yabut…
If an operator held the contact surfaces of both paddles against his hand I doubt it would know the difference and would fire.
It would probably detect a dead short paddle/paddle and not operate.
Two paddles up against a hand would feel different to the device than two paddles bracketing a heart in fibrillation.
An actual pacemaker/defibrillator (as opposed to an AED) can be used even if the heart is not in V-fib or pulseless V-tach. These are intended to be used by medical professionals using clinical judgement. They are also used as external pacemakers and for synchronized cardioversion. They CAN shock asystole or ( I believe) any rhythm or lack of.
However I am not willing to try and shock my hand in the name of science.
Several years ago, I saw actress Patricia Heaton (The Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond) on a talk show (I think it was Jay Leno). She mentioned that her husband is a safety nut, and even got a defibrillator for the home in case of emergencies.
The host asked, “Defibrillator? Is that that thing with the paddles that you put on someone’s chest and say ‘Clear?’”
She replied, “‘Clear?’ Is that what you say? I thought you were supposed to say ‘Pull.’”
I hope her husband never has a heart attack while he’s out skeet shooting.
I thought it was “fire in the hole”. 
It’s also my most [del]maddening[/del] interesting trope in TV shows or movies where the victim flat-lines and they apply the paddles. It’s a defibrillator machine dammit, not a jump start. I hurl [del] shoes, sweaty socks, grenades [/del] insults at the screen.
In case anyone doesn’t know, a defibrillator’s job is actually to stop the heart. After that, it’s hoped that the body will re-start it on its own, and hopefully get it right this time.
To further clarify, a heart has two different ways it can beat. It can beat all in unison, dub-dub, which works just fine for pumping blood, or it can have every bit and piece of heart tissue each marching to the beat of a different drummer, which causes the heart as a whole to just sort of quiver a bit in place and pump almost no blood. This second state is called fibrillation, and it’s stable: A heart in fibrillation will tend to remain in fibrillation. So if you have a heart in fibrillation, you have to stop it from doing the useless thing so it can start doing something more useful.
I was going to picture laying a rod of metal across the terminals of a car battery, or plugging both ends of a wire into the two receptacles in a wall outlet–with each end of the wire (albeit an insulated wire) fitted with ordinary plug prongs. :eek:
Where I used to work, a manager had a minor heart attack and spent some away. When he returned, we put a car battery with some curly wires attached on his desk and a big label “FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY”
You’ve gotta laugh…
Were there big copper clips on the ends of the wires? :eek: !!
Standard customer support solution: “Have you tried rebooting?”
Automated external defibrillators are smart, but there are professional units with manual overrides.
Also ALS level defibrillators that can manually shock and even put a healthy person into SCA!:eek:
Maybe I am mis-remembering, but in old time TV shows, I think it was standard operating procedures to:
- Rub the paddles together
- Yell out “Clear!!!”
- Apply the paddles to the chest
I am thinking it was mainly “Emergency!” where I would see this.
Maybe this was in the days before batteries and they had to rub the paddles to build up a static charge.