New CPR Standards and Other Health Care News

You may have already heard but I wanted to again proselytize the new American Heart Association CPR standard for bystander CPR. The new standard is for hands-only CPR for adults who experienced cardiac compromise. This is a great change for several reasons:
1) Works just as well for adults in cardiac compromise (this is the best reason).
2) Easier to remember. No longer do you need to remember 30:1 or 20:2 chest compression to breath ratios.
3) Protects good Samaritans from communicable diseases. No longer do you need to put your mouth over someone else's mouth. You don't know where that mouth has been. Stay away. Hepatitis is very scary and very prevalent.

Now, after I said that I also want to give a few caveats:
1) Go to a community CPR training class.You can learn two person CPR, CPR for children and infants, and become more comfortable with the whole idea. To find a class near you click here and use the "Find A Class" tool.
2) If you are alone and witness someone having a cardiac event, call 911 first. If there is someone else, one of you call 911, the other start chest compressions.
3) Hands-only is for adults. An adult is anyone showing signs of puberty. Children are not just little adults. They are more likely to have experienced respiratory failure, which means mouth-to-mouth is the most important. Children's lungs are smaller than adults, thus you need to push less air. But they breath more times per minute. This is why the class is good. It gets more complicated for children, and I would imagine the situation would be even more stressful.
4) Hands-only is only for cardiac events. If you pull someone from water you want to do both chest and mouth-to-mouth. The chest compressions can act as a Heimlich maneuver, the mouth-to-mouth will get air to the lungs.
5) Get an AED if one is available! CPR will never bring someone back on its own no matter what you have seen in stupid movies. If the heart does not have its own electrical impulse then CPR cannot create one. You need an AED to do that.

Ah... now I feel better.
I had to order a surprising amount of personal protective gear this morning for my summer class. I am taking Anatomy and Physiology I this summer, and the lab uses formaldehyde, which is nasty to fetuses. So, I ordered an awesome face mask (seen here), and some basic nitryl disposable gloves. I will look so rad!