You’re walking through the grocery store when a 60-something-year-old man in your aisle collapses. He is not responding and a crowd of bystanders are forming, with no one jumping in to do anything. Do you know what to do? That answer for too many people is “no” because they don’t know CPR, or if they do, they don’t want to perform mouth-to-mouth on a complete stranger. And, in this era with countless transmissible diseases, we can’t really blame them.
Cardiac arrest equals sudden death- that man will die unless someone does something quick. Calling 911 is important, but not enough as the average response time is about 8-12 minutes. In that amount of time, the brain has gone without blood flow/oxygen and will have permanent damage.
So, now many organizations are teaching CCR (cardiocerebral resuscitation). In CCR, you do chest compressions- fast and hard- at a rate of about 100 compressions each minute. You don’t stop to give breaths and you keep going until trained medical help arrives. When starting chest compressions, it takes approximately a full minute to build up enough pressure to adequately perfuse the brain and other vital organs. In traditional CPR where you stop every 2 minutes for breaths, the blood pressure immediately falls to zero when you stop to give those two rescue breaths. It then takes another full minute to restore the blood pressure after compressions are started again. Hense, the main benefit of continuous compressions using cardiocerebral resuscitation- there is no interruption in blood supply to the organs.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of CCR. I would love to see more people get comfortable doing compressions so they have the confidence to jump in when it really counts. I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve see come through the ER in cardiac arrest where no one did CPR (or CCR) until the paramedics arrived. In cases like these, I’ve personally seen a 0% survival rate. I can’t even imagine the feeling of helplessness that a man or woman would feel watching their spouse laying on the floor and not knowing what to do. And even worse, after they pass away, the feeling of “what if I was able to save him” that they would live with for the rest of their life.
