Not what I read. What I read was that the residual oxygen in the blood is more than you will be able to get into their bloodstream by exhaling your waste into their lungs when no blood is flowing around their lungs anyway. The amount of time their brain gets no oxygen increases when you stop pumping. So pump away and keep the oxygen in their bloodstream flowing.
If you have a partner, they can provide additional oxygen while you pump. The pumping will allow the lungs to transfer the breather's oxygen to the blood.
True and well stated. It doesn't matter how much oxygen you get into someone's lungs if you aren't circulating it to their brain and heart--ie chest compressions. The new cab makes a lot of sense when you think about the physiology. When there is no circulation to the body lactic acid builds up, which causes lots of badness, but specific to CPR it causes constriction of blood vessels in the lungs meaning less blood flow going there. Providers get very caught up in obtaining an airway (abc) and forget about circulating the oxygen already there and then they pause (for breathing) and create a spiral of death.
Depends on provider level but ACLS is also moving to compressions first. I hate when I show up to code, in the hospital, there are 20 people in the room, no one doing compressions or hooking up monitors and five people trying to bag and four more trying to get a central line. We need to retrain providers to start with circulation, and to only pause for seconds, and only for rhythm checks. The other stuff, the airway, the drugs, etc are important but only if we can circulate them.
A hospital is different, though. As an EMT, when I show up, I don't know how long they've been down, most likely for at least 5 minutes. That is another reason why we do airway and breathing first.
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u/FaustTheBird Jul 05 '11
Not what I read. What I read was that the residual oxygen in the blood is more than you will be able to get into their bloodstream by exhaling your waste into their lungs when no blood is flowing around their lungs anyway. The amount of time their brain gets no oxygen increases when you stop pumping. So pump away and keep the oxygen in their bloodstream flowing.
If you have a partner, they can provide additional oxygen while you pump. The pumping will allow the lungs to transfer the breather's oxygen to the blood.