Friday, September 2, 2011

Stop The Presses (Yet Again)

Ok, remember how in cardiac arrests we used to do CPR until you had the pads on, and then we would stop to analyze the rhythm?

And then remember a few years ago we were told that we needed to do uninterrupted CPR for two minutes before we did ANYTHING?

Well, now it turns out that, at the least, the latter is no more beneficial than the former, and at worst, may be hurting our patients.

Evidence-based medicine is only as good as the evidence that begets it.

Now someone bring me MAST trousers and an amp of Bretylium....

http://www.jems.com/article/news/prolonging-cpr-doesnt-help?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+jems%2Fthelatest+%28JEMS.com%3A+The+Latest+EMS+News+%26+Features%29

3 comments:

Christopher said...

A few recent studies on cardiac arrest treatment modalities have had their authors lamenting how hard it is to get approval to test even traditional (read: unproven) treatments.

Worse still, without a rigorous QA/QI process in place, it is very difficult to ensure homogeneity of compressions, etc.

This was certainly an interesting study, and my takeaway was the emphasis on appropriate timing of defibrillation. What that appropriate timing is, apparently we're still working on! :)

Brandon O said...

Just remember that nowadays, they're pushing the idea of team-based CPR, so while one person's pushing someone else should be applying pads, and so forth -- on the subject of whether to explicitly take a couple minutes of compressions before shocking (on the off chance that someone collapses and falls into a pile of AED pads) the current recommendations have no opinion.

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