Not really spoilers, but just a warning before my rant, so look away!
Tonight’s episode featured several residents and attendings performing CPR on patients, and boy did they do it wrong. Normally it’s fun to get mad at the
medical dramas for their medical inaccuracy, because we medical folks know better, but I honestly think the producers and medical consultants for the show really did
viewers (and the public at large) a disservice, as CPR is one of the areas of medicine that the
public
may be called upon to perform
20 million people watch the show (and that’s just in the US), and with no change in the plot, timing, or dialog, the writers, directors, and actors could have
been demonstrating proper CPR technique. They got the ratio of breaths to compressions wrong, and they got the speed and force of compressions wrong, too.
According to the 2005 guidelines (click the image for a full-sizer)
, you give 2 breaths per 30 compressions (they did 2 breaths per 5 compressions), and you should be pushing hard, moving the chest wall. You should be trying to mimic
a heart rate of 100–that’s almost 2 compressions a second. The 2 codes that I’ve seen have not been pretty; they’ve been violent, frantic, and
aggressive. People performing CPR generally can’t keep it up for more than a couple minutes:
it is exhausting
.
So rather that demonstrate what it
should
look like when a
real
person is actually
performing CPR
, they demonstrated the wrong technique in a watered-down version. I hope to God that if a viewer has to perform CPR in the future, he or she doesn’t use
Grey’s as their refresher course or example.
Here are the latest CPR guidelines
, and
you can learn CPR at a class near you
. (But remember, the most important step is early activation of 911. And also remember your ABCs: Airway, Breathing, Circulation!)
Update: Oh no!
Dr. Karen Pike
is the medical consultant, she’s an ER doc, she lives in the Bay Area,
and
she graduated from Stanford’s ER residency! Busted!
Update 2:
I love you, YouTube CPR
.
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