How long ago did you first start learning CPR?

Were your CPR instructors strict about the number of compressions and breathes to do? Did they stress the need for ‘x’ number of compressions followed by ‘x’ number of breathes? Did you have trouble finding the carotid pulse? Difficulty getting the breathes in?

Well, you can relax. Things have really changed since the early days of CPR training.

Why?

Well, it turns out that the frequent stopping to breath air into the victim isn’t actually best action. Research has shown that even a second of pausing in compressions can cause a 1% reduction in the likelihood of getting the heartbeat to return.

So if you haven’t updated your CPR knowledge lately, it might be time to do so.

Start by checking out the new first aid guidelines that the American Heart Association put out last year. Based on the research over the past few years, they are now suggesting that the ‘mouth to mouth’ part of CPR is unnecessary.

In fact, they have moved to a ‘hands-only’ CPR technique for bystanders which focuses on two steps involving calling 911 (in US) and then pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest.

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But instead of just reading the guidelines put out by the American Heart Foundation, now would be a good time to update your knowledge with a CPR/First Aid course.

You can find a CPR class near you using the American Heart Foundation’s ECC Class Connector which lists all the CPR, First Aid, AED and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC) classes in the United States.

Wow, it seems that people really are suffering with sore, dry feet. I’d love to give you all a pedi-relax set to help make it better. But unfortunately, there are only three to giveaway.

And the random number selector says that the lucky recipients will be…

Angie

Julie Donahue

Kathy Conley

Congratulations to the winners. You should be getting an email shortly with directions on how and where to provide your mailing address.

As for the rest of us, there is always a chance to win again tomorrow.

If your medicine cabinet is like most people’s, it’s harboring all kinds of unused or outdated meds like antibiotics and pain-killers.

Instead of dumping them in the trash or toilet, consider donating them to Flying Doctors or Aid for AIDS, where volunteer medical teams headed to Mexico or Central America will be able to make good use of them.

While the meds may not be 100% potent or effective, the mere presence of any kind of medical intervention for those who have no other options may just save a life. A pretty great alternative to wasting, no?

Thanks in advance for your consideration - this has been your Healthbolt feel-good Happy Living Tip of the day.

It’s just like the old paper cut saying: The smaller the cut, the worse it hurts. With shaving, the smaller the nick, the worse it bleeds. Unless you gash yourself wide open with a brand new razor,then…

Anyway, it happens to all of us. We shave, we nick. But here’s a quick tip on how to stop the bleeding in a hurry:

Step 1: Use a cotton ball or swab to dab a little witch hazel onto the cut. Witch hazel is a natural astringent which tightens surrounding tissues and slows bleeding.

Step 2: Hold an ice cube or ice pack to the nick. The coolness helps to clot the blood.

See, easy right? I told you.

So this, my dear friends, has been your Healthbolt Happy Living Tip of the Day. You may now go forth and de-fuzz without worry.

Dang! Another instance where conventional wisdom and years-old treatments have failed us yet again.

Bloody noses - a staple in the lives of kids, sports-playing teens and allergy-ridden adults - are not to be treated by tipping the head back as once was thought. Instead, you are to lower and tip your head forward, catching any wayward bleeding in a tissue.

Why is this? Because tipping the head back will send blood down into the esophagus and potentially into the stomach, which can be irritating and possibly cause vomiting. But by leaning the head forward, you can avoid such issues.

Other treatment tips? Pinch the meaty party of your nose on the sides just below your bridge to help ease bleeding. Also be sure to keep your nose above heart level, which can also help slow things down.

If the bleeding hasn’t stopped within 20 minutes or your trauma was caused by a blow to the head, be sure to see your doctor. Otherwise, leaning forward should do you well.

This has been a Healthbolt Easy Health Tip.
Source

They say ‘laughter is the best medicine’ so next time you need to fill up on bandaids and aspirin, skip the traditional products and head over to Help Remedies. They’ve put out some products that will not only cover the cut and fix the headache but will also amuse you….

Got a Headache….Have an Aspirin.

Cut yourself….Here’s a bandaid

By the way, this is a company concerned not only with the envrionment but also society. The packaging is made out of compostable, recycled paper pulp, with a tiny amount of plastic around the pills (an FDA requirement). Plus they plan to give 5% of their profits to charities that will help people without healthcare get healthcare.

This really is a company with a healthy attitude…

(discovered via Eco Salon)

No one ever wants to be placed in a position where they have to perform CPR on someone. But we all learn just in case. We sweat through the first aid class and try desperately to remember the steps. We worry about how many times we have to breathe into the person, where to push down on the chest, and how often and fast.

But performing CPR has just got a whole lot easier with an American Heart Association announcement Monday that the days of mouth-to-mouth breathing are now over.

Hands Only CPR - calling for help and deep, rapid chest compressions - at a rate of 100/minute - until help arrives is new recommended practice.

While it might seem like an extreme change to a practice that we have all had drilled into us at first aid classes, experts have been working towards this for some time. Studies have increasingly shown that hands-only was as good as traditional CPR.

Some experts, such as Dr. Gordon Ewy, director of the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center in Tucson, have been advocating for hands-only CPR for over 10 years. The whole concept of compression-only CPR tecnique was pioneered at the Arizona Saver Heart Center.

Ewy has long argued that ‘…there’s no point to giving early breaths in the case of sudden cardiac arrest, and it takes too long to stop compressions to give two breaths - 16 seconds for the average person’.

And he also points out that ‘Anonymous surveys show that people are reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth…partly because of fear of infections.’

But it’s important to realize that this new practice is only for adults. Collapsed children and babies should still be given mouth-to-mouth. This is because they are more likely to have collapse due to breathing problems.

The American Heart Association has launched a new website - Hands On CPR - to provide information and education on this new practice. They are also going to feature a series of short videos on YouTube about Hands On CPR. Check out their first one - Rocket Science - a humorous look at three scientists debating what to do when a colleague collapses…

Recommended practice from Hands On CPR website:

Two steps to save a life:

When an adult suddenly collapses, trained or untrained bystanders – that means a person near the victim – should:

1) Call 911

2) Push hard and fast in the center of the chest.

Studies of real emergencies that have occurred in homes, at work or in public locations, show that these two steps, called Hands-Only CPR, can be as effective as conventional CPR. Providing Hands-Only CPR to an adult who has collapsed from a sudden cardiac arrest can more than double that person’s chance of survival.

Photo Credit

So you’re cooking, right? You grab the lid off the pot so fast that it flings itself mercilessly against the inside of your wrist, sending you careening over to the kitchen sink as your dinner burns on the stove. What do you do next?

A) Run the wound under cool water.
B) Call the pizza joint and say to hell with home-cooking forever.
C) Curse so loudly your children gaze at you in horror, then scrunch up their little faces and run out of the room.
D) Schlack the burn with a bit of honey.

While your natural instincts might steer you toward B and C, what you really need to do is take a deep breath, then proceed with A, then D.

D, you say? Yes, D. Because out of all the wacky home remedies out there to treat burns, honey has been shown to be a pretty darn effective one. In fact, honey possesses both anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties, so it should head off infection and relieve burn-inflicted swelling. Keeping this in mind, after rinsing the wound with cool water, spread a dab of honey over the burn and cover it with a no-stick sterile gauze pad.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve sung the praises of honey, mind you. The stuff sure as heck is good for more than just sweetening up oatmeal or a peanut butter sandwich. In fact, since honey is not as widely used to treat wounds and infections as other over-the-counter pharmaceutical choices, it has yet to become resistant to the same super-bacterias that are outsmarting those OTC choices. Ah, the gift of nature.

Have you used honey on your wounds? Will you now that you’ve read this? I can’t wait (er, sort of) for one of my nearly-famous dinner-making burns to test out this trick. Fingers crossed!

I saw the heading ‘Heart Attack in Casino Safer Than One in Hospital ‘ and thought that makes no sense. Hospitals have standard protocol for treating heart attacks and cardiac arrests. Protocol that medical staff are well trained in. Mock arrests and frequent education ensure that they are kept up-to-date with emergency resuscitation procedures. But for all that, it turns out that hospitals are not the safest place to have a heart attack or cardiac arrest.

According to an article recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine about a third of patients in hospital who suffer cardiac arrest don’t get prompt defibrillation (shocking the heart) within the recommended two minutes after a collapse. And without these immediate shocks, the patient is more likely to die or end up disabled and/or brain damaged.

In fact, it’s been determined that the odds of suffering a heart attack or cardiac arrest actually increase if you were somewhere like a casino or an airport.

Why ?

The reasoning behind this is amazingly simple. If you were to collapse in a crowded place like a casino or airport, you would receive immediate attention from the people around you. And these places also have immediate access to Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) machines designed to be used by first responders and first aiders. You hook the person up to the machine and the machine talks to you and tells you what to do. It’s brilliant technology.

Whereas, in a hospital, unless you are hooked up to cardiac monitoring equipment and/or being constantly observed, your collapse might not be noticed immediately. And this is even more of a possibility in smaller hospitals, after hours, and on the weekends. As a result, defibrillation is often delayed. Furthermore, many hospitals don’t have AED’s and the only person able to shock the patient is the doctor, who might still be running from the other side of the hospital.

Here’s hoping that if this study does nothing else, it will encourage hospitals to review their cardiac resuscitation procedures and consider purchasing AED’s so that nurses, who are ones that usually find the collapsed patient, are able to administer life-saving shocks without having to wait for the doctor.

Meanwhile, it might be a good ideas to sharpen up your CPR skills ’cause you never know when you might need them.

This isn’t the most cheerful subject to write about over the holiday season, but I read about this over at Kevin, M.D. and just had to find out more.

Here’s the scenario…

A person collapsed with a cardiac arrest over five minutes ago. Everything is intact but his heart has stopped beating and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. No medical intervention has occurred. In medical terms, he is ‘clinically dead.’

But is he?

It has long been believed that lack of circulating oxygen will cause the internal organs (especially the heart and brain) to suffer irreversible damage within four to five minutes. Hence the importance of bystander CPR and immediate medical intervention such as defibrillation.

But does irreversible damage really occur this quickly?

Having studied oxygen deprived heart cells under a microscope, Dr Lance Becker and his team at Penn Center for Resuscitation Science have discovered some startling facts. Heart cells starved of oxygen for one hour showed no signs of cell death. In fact, these heart cells, cut off from their blood supply, didn’t die until hours later.

So if the heart cells haven’t died from lack of oyxgen, then why aren’t medical professionals able to bring someone ‘back from the dead’?

Dr Becker and his team are now questioning the decades old emergency room procedure of giving the patient high flow oxygen.

“We give them oxygen.’ Becker says. “We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it’s taking up more oxygen.” Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion. (ref)

Is there a better way?

Rapid cooling and experimental cyrogenics may be the answer to bringing someone ‘back from the dead’. Dr Becker explains…