Magnificent Magnesium by Dennis Goodman

Author:Dennis Goodman [Goodman, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780757003912
Publisher: Square One Publishers
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

What is Defibrillation?

Anyone who has ever seen a television show set in a hospital is probably familiar with the sequence of events that unfolds when a patient goes into cardiac arrest. Doctors rush in and apply two large paddles to the patient’s bare chest, delivering a shock that dramatically jolts the patient back to life.

In reality, the process of defibrillation is a bit more complicated. Although on television it may look like the defibrillator uses an electrical shock to restart the heart, the opposite is true—the electrical shock actually stops the heart! By stunning the heart, the defibrillator effectively resets the heart’s batteries, allowing the SA node to initiate a new electrical signal from a resting position.

Moreover, because they serve to reset the heart, defibrillators can be used not only to treat cardiac arrest, but also cases of severe or chronic arrhythmia, in which electrical disturbances have caused an abnormal heartbeat. Consequently, there are several different kinds of defibrillators available for use besides the manual external defibrillator you’ve seen on television. There are also automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), which are simpler units that use advanced computing to analyze the heart rhythms of the patient automatically before delivering the shock, and can be used by the public with little to no prior emergency care experience. For patients with chronic life-threatening arrhythmias, a special type of defibrillator called an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) can be surgically inserted into the heart, where it can monitor the heartbeat more closely and deliver shocks as needed.

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