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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