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medpundit |
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Thursday, October 09, 2003A detailed quality-of-life analysis was conducted on 268 people who survived cardiac arrest because they got bystander help. The researchers measured vision, hearing, mental ability, speech and other characteristics, finding an average score of 0.80 on a 0-to-1 scale, barely below the 0.83 score for the general population, the report says. 'The perception is that trying to save people by bystander CPR is futile,' Stiell says. 'That is not at all true, according to what we found.' The study also found that few people are trained to give CPR for cardiac arrest. Only 14.3 percent of the more than 8,000 persons who experienced cardiac arrest had CPR administered by trained bystanders. However, if you’re unfortunate enough to need CPR, your chances of surviving at all are pretty low: The 8091 cardiac arrest patients had overall survival rates of 5.2% to hospital discharge and 4.0% to 1 year. We successfully contacted and evaluated 268 of 316 (84.8%) of known 1-year survivors. No word on how well it works for pets. PSA: Find a CPR course near you. UPDATE: EMT, accountant, and blogger, Chuck Simmins has this to say about CPR: The truly sad thing about CPR is pointed out in your blog post. As EMT's we go through all of the training, and all of the "hype", and almost never save anyone. If you're dead when we get there, you'll still be dead when we get you to the hospital. And, there is no dignity in our attempts to resuscitate. In the five years that I have been with my current ambulance corps, we have had two saves. One guy dropped at an event that had several E/D docs and nurses, and several cardiac MD's in attendance, so got effective CPR immediately, and he responded to the AED. The other was effective drug box dumping on the part of the paramedic. In no other case that I am aware of did any patient in arrest recover, perhaps three dozen during that time. In reality, the miracles of EMS that I see regularly are two, Lasix, and nebs (inhaled medication -ed.) for asthma. Both turn around a really sick patient on a consistent basis prior to our arrival at the E/D. Miracle reversals of patient condition. Paramedic skills, but I get to see them while I take blood pressures and such. I call Lasix the Lazarus drug, because of the way it reverses the patient's condition so effectively. posted by Sydney on 10/09/2003 08:40:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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