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Seattle App Summons Help When You Need CPR (geekwire.com)
An anonymous reader writes:Sudden cardiac arrest is usually fatal. But Seattle's Fire Department has joined with the city's Medic One Foundation to develop an app which alerts emergency dispatchers and also CPR-trained bystanders when someone needs CPR. The PulsePoint app also shows the location of the nearest defibrillator, and Seattle's mayor says he hopes it will save lives. A Spokane version of the app is already credited with helping to save the life of an infant, and the Medic One Foundation hopes to work with more local fire department to bring the app to the rest of Washington State.
This works in Seattle because we have high speed gigabit Internet everywhere. Very progressive city council makes sure we have a variety of ISPs to choose from as well. This is what investing in your infrastructure brings you!
If I read that right, there are two apps for two cities?
Is that PulsePoint data available anywhere (the location of portable defib stations?) it seems like it would be a great idea to have an open API to that data set that let anyone build an app that could find the nearest defib wherever you were on Earth... and perhaps a network of people registered for CPR that was shared between apps, so they could choose to use whichever app they trusted to share current location.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A mobile app that actually does something useful.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
What an absolute crock of shit.
Eight weeks ago I had the misfortune of my heart going into fribulation due to an un diagnosed coronary artery blockage. To my luck there was a nurse and a trained first aider who witnessed my collapse and came to the rescue. I was resuscitated and a defibrillator applied before the ambulance arrived (which happened quickly anyhow).
I have no detectable brain damage and even enzyme evidence of heart muscle damage was so low that the doctors in the ER were sceptical that I had went into fribulation (until they interrogated the AED that was used on me).
So may be it is some medical conspiracy but what the fuck. Quick action and resuscitation saved my life and minimised damage. If I had to wait for the ambulance before resuscitation I would probably have died or best case suffered the usual raft of prolonged hypoxia syndromes.
Given the aging overweight Slashdot population this is probably the most important news today.
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. Yup, that's the question the instructors hate. I asked it during my defib class, and you could see the instructor grimace, then a split second of "should I lie?", then the truth. Dfib works better than straight new version CPR only, but only a little.
You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family
Having seen just that with my mother, who died instantly, versus the other parents who lingered way too long, I gotta say she won the death lottery. Healthy, then boom - outa here.
And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Then again, most of longevity is based upon genetics. Most of the men in my family, without accidents, tend to live to around 85. With maintenance drugs and preventative medical care and a healthy lifestyle, they've extended that to around 85.
No one gets out of here alive. If a person wants to adopt the starving rat life extension protocol, and they are happy doing it, then great. But even then, any extension is on the old end of the scale. screw that, if I'm going to live to 125, I want most of those years to be 30, not living in a nursing home.
Live well, love well, eat well and laugh - it's the ultimate revenge. I'm in it for quality, not quantity.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I was resuscitated and a defibrillator applied before the ambulance arrived (which happened quickly anyhow).
If this actually happend to you AC, you apparently do not know just how lucky you were, Your outcome is very rare. Congrats, indeed.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
On one hand, there is clear scientific evidence showing a diet very high in fats and sugars is unhealthy.
On the other, there's several hundred million years of evolution screaming in your brain to cram down all the calories you can, because you don't know when the next meal will be available and the hard winter times are coming.
While individuals can sometimes resist their instincts, it's very difficult to do so, and this can be seen at a population level. If it were easy, abstinence-only programs would work.
The thing is, with proper first aid (to wit, competently done CPR from the get-go), the "reasonable recovery" rate is significantly higher than just 2%. Of course, it is important to realise that with current medical technology, it will never get any higher than ~20% or so. I have the 20% figure from a cardiologist: according to him, 80% of cardiac arrest cases are for reasons that are lethal with our current medical capabilities anyway: even with the best pre-clinical care possible, these will not result in a positive outcome (that is, anything other than, at "best", lingering death).
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs, that is. So investing effort into improving pre-clinical medical care (and in particular, competent first responders) is not wasted. You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
He was exceptionally lucky to survive 9 minutes without permanent brain damage. He might have had some residual heart function which delivered some minimal oxygen to the brain for the first few minutes of his "cardiac arrest". Good to hear that he made a full recovery: stories like that are much needed morale boosters for EMTs like myself, and many others: the sad truth is that even for us who bring plenty of kit and experience to the party, CPR does not end up doing much useful in most of the cases we see. The few where it does work of course make it more than worthwhile, though.
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
% recovery depends on what your denominator is. if you include the folks who die, then that obviously reduces the percentage who regain full function. if you use the patients who recover as your denominator, the incidence of permanent cognitive defects is more like 30%. http://annals.org/article.aspx... http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and is related to how quickly you get treatment, which is where this app comes in.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Your chances of ever recovering full cognitive function after cardiac arrest are less than 2% with current techniques and procedures. Yup, that's the question the instructors hate. I asked it during my defib class, and you could see the instructor grimace, then a split second of "should I lie?", then the truth. Dfib works better than straight new version CPR only, but only a little.
You are an "idiot" (to use your words) if you choose a painful, lingering death in a hospital with cognitive impairment over a quick and mostly painless death from cardiac arrest, and that isn't even taking into account the massive financial burden you impose on your family
Having seen just that with my mother, who died instantly, versus the other parents who lingered way too long, I gotta say she won the death lottery. Healthy, then boom - outa here.
And note that once your brain has been damaged from cardiac arrest, you will probably not be able to make any medical decisions for yourself anymore ever.
The way to deal with cardiac arrest is to avoid it in the first place, through a healthy lifestyle and (if necessary) various implantable devices. It's that kind of preventive care that poor populations don't receive and that we need to improve.
Then again, most of longevity is based upon genetics. Most of the men in my family, without accidents, tend to live to around 85. With maintenance drugs and preventative medical care and a healthy lifestyle, they've extended that to around 85.
No one gets out of here alive. If a person wants to adopt the starving rat life extension protocol, and they are happy doing it, then great. But even then, any extension is on the old end of the scale. screw that, if I'm going to live to 125, I want most of those years to be 30, not living in a nursing home.
Live well, love well, eat well and laugh - it's the ultimate revenge. I'm in it for quality, not quantity.
American medicine is highly slanted towards "heroic" medicine, i.e. giving people at the end of their lives another month or two, often spent in hospital. Both in what we pay doctors for, and in the kind of prestige we give to various specialties. Obviously this is the lowest bang for the buck, even without including quality of life into the math. But the worst part of it is that in doing so, we end up actually doing less on cheap and highly effective but boring stuff, like ensuring that pregnant women get proper nutrition, and vitamins if necessary, than other countries do, thereby guaranteeing that we have a good percentage of low birth weight babies, which we then save via more heroic medicine, and they end up with a lifetime of health problems.
If you break those "life expectancy by country" tables down by age bracket, you see that our worst performance is with newborns and infants, and as people get older our relative performance improves, until if you make it to over 65 we do provide longest life expectancy from that point on.
Which perfectly explains how we end up spending the most per capita and providing the lowest life expectancy over all.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Calorie restriction does not really extend maximum lifespan, but it does improve quality of life throughout the lifespan (age-related degeneration, both physical and mental, is slowed by about 1/3 throughout the entire life, not simply extending the lifespan).
Like most of the "healthy lifestyle" stuff, like not smoking, getting exercise, etc. which all tends to keep you healthy and active longer in your old age, despite the usual detractors' claim that "it just extends the years you spend old and sick". Extending the years you spend old and sick is what doctors are for.
The idea that "I would rather enjoy myself in my youth than spend more years old and sick" falls apart after you've seen enough 50 year olds with COPD on oxygen who can't climb a flight of stairs any more.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The thing is, with proper first aid (to wit, competently done CPR from the get-go), the "reasonable recovery" rate is significantly higher than just 2%. Of course, it is important to realise that with current medical technology, it will never get any higher than ~20% or so. I have the 20% figure from a cardiologist: according to him, 80% of cardiac arrest cases are for reasons that are lethal with our current medical capabilities anyway: even with the best pre-clinical care possible, these will not result in a positive outcome (that is, anything other than, at "best", lingering death).
However, there is quite a difference between 2% and 20%. That amounts to quite a number of people who might yet have a few years (or months, as the case may be) to live *with a decent quality of life* - iff no hypoxic brain damage occurs, that is. So investing effort into improving pre-clinical medical care (and in particular, competent first responders) is not wasted. You never know whether someone you know might fall into the 18% group.
The more unexpected the cardiac arrest, the less likely the recovery. The healthy athletic 30 year old who drops dead is least likely to recover even with rapid treatment, whereas the person who is an obvious risk for cardiac arrest and has maybe already had one or more is most often susceptible to being jump started. It makes a certain kind of sense, if you're not abusing the machinery and it blows up anyway, it clearly has some intrinsic physical flaw that dooms you,
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Millions of years of evolution also have given man the ability to overcome his instincts. Food is no different from sex or violence.
Yes, in that the average person is completely useless at saying no to any of them.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
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mod up, insightful.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
American medicine is highly slanted towards "heroic" medicine, i.e. giving people at the end of their lives another month or two, often spent in hospital. Both in what we pay doctors for, and in the kind of prestige we give to various specialties. Obviously this is the lowest bang for the buck, even without including quality of life into the math.
As an example of that, my mother in law racked up at least 675,000 dollars in medical treatment in the last year of her life. It was actually more, but 675,000 is what I can verify. All of th eother costs put together probably made it a million.
All this for a woman who was uffering form dementia, was either in a wheelchair or bedridden. Whne she had a lucid moment - about once a month, she expressed the desire to die. Other times she was an unhappy crying dementia patient.
If you break those "life expectancy by country" tables down by age bracket, you see that our worst performance is with newborns and infants, and as people get older our relative performance improves, until if you make it to over 65 we do provide longest life expectancy from that point on.
The insurance system is pretty well rigged that way. Interestingly enough, despite the average age of death has risen, the endpoints have not. Which reminds me, I saw a commercial aimed at millenials talking about a retirement plan and how they'll live to 140. Not in the cards, young'uns.
Which perfectly explains how we end up spending the most per capita and providing the lowest life expectancy over all.
And I laugh every time a politician claims that we have the best healthcare system in the world.....
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.