5 Things You Probably Don’t Know About CPR

If you have ever taken a CPR course before, your experience probably differs greatly from another person who has been CPR certified. It could be due to the instructor you had, or maybe there were different research guidelines in place at the time.

In any event, often times you are taught to do something but it’s never explained why. So, below are 5 things you probably didn’t learn in your CPR class.

1. Give breaths just until you see chest rise. When we see the chest rise, that indicates the lungs are full of air. If we continue to blow and over-inflate the lungs, the air will overflow into the stomach. The stomach is like a balloon. It blows up to a point and then collapses. This collapse causes vomitting which makes for a mess, but more seriously it can get into the patient’s lungs, causing infection which usually leads to death even if you get their heart to start again.
2. Perform compressions on an infant with 2 fingers. Why can’t we use one hand or our fist? Those 2 fingers hurt. Well, infants are so fragile that if we use the full weight of our hand, it can crush the infant. The pain we feel in our 2 fingers is the safety measure to prevent us from applying too much pressure on the infant.
3. Compress at a rate of 100 per minute. We all know that’s the right answer, but what happens if you go too fast or too slow. If you go too fast, you don’t give the hear enough time to refill with blood before your next compression. Essentially, you are pumping an empty heart. If you go too slow, you won’t build up the necessary blood pressure to allow for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide to occur.
4. CAB vs ABC. It’s hard to believe such an old acronym has changed to CAB (compressions, airway, breathing), but why?? Studies show that there is still oxygenated blood in a person’s body. We can give them breaths, but that is not going to do anything. Until we start compressions and raise their blood pressure, the oxygen they have will not get to those vital organs.
5. If you find a child or infant who is unresponsive and needs CPR, perform CPR for 2 minutes and then call 911. The number 1 reason for cardiac arrest in infants is due to a respiratory issue (asthma, choking, etc). Children are highly oxygen dependent, and if we don’t know how long a child has been down, we need to perform CPR immediately to get them the oxygen they need. The survival rates in children who were in cardiac arrest due to a respiratory issue is very high.

You can learn more about these and other little known facts by taking one of our CPR classes. All our instructors are medical professionals who have experience in what they teach. Experience the difference at Vitali and contact us today!