A friend was sailing, and capsized. A guy in a motorboat offered to help, and they attached a rope between the two boats, and motorboat guy started his engine without looking to see that my friend was still tying the knot. And the tension on that rope did a lot of damage to my friend’s thumb.
Motorboat dufus is protected from civil liability by the good Samaritan laws. They have teeth.
In Canada rescue breathing is still recommended.
I have done plenty of CPR, though perhaps less than an EMT. It is recommended to remove metal before cardioversion or defibrillation, and it would be hard to put pads on without removing a bra. Once during a code, no pads were immediately available. I shocked a bare chest on a patient who had just entered VFib, which saved a life but caused a superficial burn, causing mild and treatable discomfort.
The goal of chest compressions is to push hard and fast. Hard means the recoil is about a third the thickness of the chest, typically two inches in an adult. Wearing a bra or pushing on breasts would not change this. In practice, one can usually avoid pushing on the breasts directly.
Good Samaritan laws protect non-professionals unless they egregiously cause outrageous harm. In CPR you would be protected in a patient not breathing or without pulse, though calling 911 and activating EMS promptly is still the wise move.
People are often concerned about breaking ribs. This is extremely rare, but should not be an immediate concern because the ribs would be unlikely to be displaced. Still, a common fear.
Yeah it’s your basic red pill persecution fantasy mixed with people who didn’t understand female anatomy or how CPR is actually performed.
It’s recommended again in the US, after a few years when it wasn’t. In my latest CPR training, the instructor said
He also gave us a mouth shield, and said that if you aren’t willing to do mouth-to-mouth, you don’t have to, and just compressions is better than nothing.
CPR success rate is roughly 7%, AED is 38%.
Point to someone nearby and tell them call 911 (US of course)
Point to another and tell them “Get the AED”, spell out where it is if they look confused. If the closest one is unknown, assign several people to go look for one.
Tell a specific person to look up the current CPR steps. If there are enough people, tell several.
Begin CPR while waiting on the AED to return.
Try to find a second person to switch off with, giving CPR can be exhausting if you’re not in great shape.
AED and CPR work together.
7% is far greater than 0%.
38% is practical miraculous.
I’m now 7 years removed from my last training. I should probably go for a class at the parks department. They generally have free one annually. I’m 10 years removed from my last first aid training.
Most places of business are strongly encouraged to have AEDs now in New Jersey. Required for nursing homes, health clubs, and schools.
There are plans to expand this requirement to places like large stores and hotels. I think it should be required in any offfice/plant with over 20 employees.
And in case it’s not obvious, the reason to call 911 isn’t to avoid liability. It’s because the team that will respond has more training, more tools, more resources, and more stamina than you have. Your goal is to keep some oxygen moving until the EMTs arrive. And to administer the AED if one is available, and pray it helps.
But the way, using an AED is dead simple. The machine comes with clear and simple instructions, and it decides whether to administer a shock, you don’t have to make that determination. If there’s no one trained in CPR, but there is an AED lying around, it’s worth trying it while you wait for the 911 team to arrive.
For the sake of completeness, having a second rescuer allows you to more easily achieve a cyclic ratio of chest compressions to breaths of 15:2. A single rescuer uses a ratio of 30:2 in an adult, which is a useful and practical (but not optimum) amount of breaths.
In the late 80s in Philadelphia there was an uproar over a parking attendant who had a heart attack. A woman standing right by him was a nurse, but she did nothing because she didn’t have her mouth shield or gloves in her purse and claimed she didn’t want to have any contact without personal protection.
Someone else called 911 and performed CPR, and the guy survived. He knew the nurse and had run ins with her in the past. He was Black, she was White. I actually knew the guy (Jerry was his name).
After I posted I realized my memory was faulty, and the bra thing had been about applying AED electrodes, not CPR. Sorry about that.
Can/will 911 help guide you in basic first aid until EMTs arrive? Including guiding you on how to do CPR if you have not been trained to do it? I get that doesn’t seem a great idea but can it be worse than doing nothing if they know the EMTs can’t possibly get there in time?
This might have had something to do with it:
‘Good Samaritan’ bullied, beaten and called a kidnapper after helping lost child
A sensationalist and rare exception to the norm? Maybe. But imagine you suddenly realize your toddler daughter is missing, and then you spot her walking away hand-in-hand with a strange-to-you man. What’s your first impulse:
“Oh thank god, that good Samaritan is bringing my daughter to safe harbor!”
or
“Oh shit, that pervy motherfucker is kidnapping my daughter so he can do who-knows-what to her!”
If the second is the first conclusion, that person might have some major issues.
I hope that wouldn’t be the first reaction.
The reaction described there is way too much, but I do get the fear when it’s your kid and some stranger. But I would hope the reaction would be “Hey, that’s my kid!” and not immediately jumping to conclusions and attacking them. If they are just trying to help the kid find their parents, then you’ve just helped. And, in the unlikely chance they weren’t, you may scare them off.
Yeah, i think an intermediate, “hey, that’s my kid!” reaction would be the norm, and you’d evaluate the guy based on how he and your kid reacted when you saw them (and vice versa).
Absolutely. The binary described above makes no sense at all.
It seems to be a common one. My brother works with children, and he tells me that because he’s a man he’s required to be in sight of a woman at all times. Not because they think he’s a sexual predator, but because we’ve trained the public to equate men with sexual predators and so many people are ready to make that accusation given any opportunity.
Same, I work with kids and we’re taught to never put ourselves (or at least I was as a male) in a situation that might be misconstrued (which goes smack against helping them with the bathroom so I dunno).
Yeah, when our neighbor fell down his stairs, and his wife came running for help (after she’d called 911), my sister took over doing CPR. The wife was doing it wrongly and weakly. Sister said she was only doing compressions for about five minutes before the paramedics got there, and she was exhausted.
Sadly, he had a rather severe head injury and bleeding in the brain, so he didn’t make it. Awesome that your wife is doing well and expected to do even better.
Yes, in the incident I’ve described, the wife and my sister were on the phone to 911 the whole time until the EMTs got there.
So here we have a report about women getting worse health care, but of course this thread has a surprise twist — it’s men who are the real victims.
I have been CPR certified 8 times due to a previous job. Card lasts 2 years.
The important thing to remember when doing CPR is that you are working on a dead body. The person is dead, so you can’t really hurt them, you are just trying to keep the body ‘fresh’ until other help arrives or they are transported to a hospital. Dead body. You don’t even start CPR on anyone who has a pulse.
Breaths are no longer considered important, just keep the blood moving and the brain will get enough oxygen to prevent major brain damage. Unless you have help from another person you are not going to be able to keep the compressions up for very long. You may not even be able to keep this up until the EMTs arrive.
You will break ribs, you will likely split their sternum. If not, you are not pumping hard enough. AEDs are a wonderful addition, if available, but they are not perfect. Pump hard and often until you can’t do it any longer.
In spite of what we see on TV, they are not going to wake up. CPR mostly doesn’t save people, you are just keeping the body fresh enough that they can die in a hospital. The hospital has other tools and drugs that may revive a person.
The goal of CPR is to keep the blood moving through the brain to prevent major brain damage. That is it.