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The Fight

dcurt.is

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Re: The Fight

#51

Post by Xylakant »

pmorici wrote: post #27
rmc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember things like this when people complain about "modern Health and Safety red tape". "Oh we need to have a this and a that and failed out inspection! Get off our back, let me create jobs." This shit saves lives.

So do you practice what you preach and carry one of these with you where ever you go, or in your vehicle? If not then why do you feel the government should impose that on a business? Why not make a law that says every business has to have a trained EMT on site during business hours. I'm sure that would save even more lives...

We have that. In germany the Berufsgenossenschaft mandates that every company with more than 2 and up to 20 employees has at least 1 person trained in first aid on site. Companies larger than that need 5% - 10% of the personal trained, depending on what work is done.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfallverh%C3%BCtungsvorschrift...

Re: The Fight

#52

Post by nate »

An interesting bit about Steve Jobs (from the biography) was that he had a foreboding feeling that he'd die early. That also seemed to encourage him to work against the status quo before it was too late.

Re: The Fight

#54

Post by carbocation »

tomhoward wrote: post #17

It's a great post, but to me there's another message that Dustin - understandably - hasn't focused on: "perfect health" is often (usually?) an illusion. Given what I've learned about health in recent years, I can't accept that this guy really was in perfect health; if he was, he wouldn't have suffered a major cardiac arrest while simply jogging on a treadmill. I think it's mostly a failure of modern medicine and mode…

Most commonly, this is going to be attributed to a ventricular arrhythmia, likely due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. This has nothing to do with cholesterol, lifestyle, diabetes, etc.

Re: The Fight

#55

Post by JshWright »

tomhoward wrote: post #17

It's a great post, but to me there's another message that Dustin - understandably - hasn't focused on: "perfect health" is often (usually?) an illusion. Given what I've learned about health in recent years, I can't accept that this guy really was in perfect health; if he was, he wouldn't have suffered a major cardiac arrest while simply jogging on a treadmill. I think it's mostly a failure of modern medicine and mode…

> I can't accept that this guy really was in perfect health;

I guess that depends on why you mean by 'perfect health.' He may very well have been in perfect health by every outward appearance. There are a large number of surprisingly minor things that can make you dead in an instant.

A brief primer on electrocardiology... Each heart beat is divided into several phases. An electrical impulse in generated in the two small chambers at the top of the heart (the atria), causing them to contract. This is the first small bump in an EKG, and is called the 'P' wave. After a brief pause, the impulse is conducted to the big chambers at the bottom of heart (the ventricles), causing them to contract. This is the big wave on an EKG, called the 'QRS complex.' After that, there's a period of time where the cells in the ventricles are recharging. This is the final bump in the EKG, called the T wave.

The Wikipedia article on this topic is very good. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocardiography#Waves_and_i...

If the heart is shocked (physically or electrically) during that recovery period, it can throw the heart into a fatal dysrhythmia where all the muscle cells in the heart are contracting chaotically. This is what happens when a baseball, lacrosse, or hockey player takes a blow to the chest and goes into sudden cardiac arrest... The blow happened during that very narrow window or time.

It's possible for your own heart to do that to itself though... It's very common for healthy people to have occasional 'premature ventricular contractions' where some random cell in the heart decides it's pissed off and wants to contract early. These are generally harmless, and happen all the time without anyone noticing. Every once in a while though, one of those PVCs occurs during that recharging phase, which can be very bad... So, a 'perfectly' healthy person _can_ throw a PVC, end up with an R-on-T contraction, and whamo... they're dead. Is it common? No, it's extremely rare. Does it happen? Sure does...

Re: The Fight

#56

Post by carbocation »

graeme wrote: post #35
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't accept that this guy really was in perfect health; if he was, he wouldn't have suffered a major cardiac arrest while simply jogging on a treadmill. That may or may not be the case. I suspect that the vast majority of cases of sudden cardiac arrest are attributable to risk factors, but probably not all. Our bodies are pretty incredible, but not perfect. Sometimes they just malfunction.

Do you have any evidence for that? Cardiac arrest is a pretty major malfunction. I'll grant that there may be a few cases of spontaneous malfunction among people with systems functioning optimally. But I'd wager that given the knowledge someone had cardiac arrest, the odds of something being wrong with their system are higher than 99.999%. Specifically, I'd be interested in cases of spontaneous cardiac arrest among h…

See my parallel comment. Aside from a possible genetic defect, it's quite possible that this person is healthy by all normally measured features. In the general case, a hunter gatherer lifestyle would likely have triggered this sooner, if anything.

Re: The Fight

#57

Post by _delirium »

philwelch wrote: post #26
pdx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to live in a world where people find a dying person laying on the floor and let him die because they're afraid of legal issues. The law protects you from such nonsense. Even if it didn't, in my opinion, no person worth a damn would allow that consideration to color their response.

Counterpoint and proviso: know what the hell you are doing . It's easily possible to do more harm than good if you don't know better. For example, whenever a motorcyclist gets into a crash, people get the bright idea that they need to get the helmet off. No, the helmet is bracing their neck, which may very well be badly injured, so sometimes if you just pull it off, now the guy's a quadriplegic, and since you were ju…

I agree with that, but in the specific case of AEDs it's hard to get something badly wrong to the extent that you actively harm: the main failure case is not doing something properly that could've been done. So you should definitely yield to someone who has better training, if available. But if there isn't such a person available, the AEDs thesmelves are completely automated and intended to be used by non-experts (experts use EDs that aren't fully automated): they sample the heart signal for several kinds of situations that can be corrected by defibrillation, and then apply the right one if detected. They won't fire at all if they're not placed correctly and/or if it isn't one of the situations where defibrillation would help, so you can't accidentally give someone the wrong kind of shock that makes the situation worse.

Re: The Fight

#58

Post by pmorici »

Xylakant wrote: post #51
pmorici wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you practice what you preach and carry one of these with you where ever you go, or in your vehicle? If not then why do you feel the government should impose that on a business? Why not make a law that says every business has to have a trained EMT on site during business hours. I'm sure that would save even more lives...

We have that. In germany the Berufsgenossenschaft mandates that every company with more than 2 and up to 20 employees has at least 1 person trained in first aid on site. Companies larger than that need 5% - 10% of the personal trained, depending on what work is done. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfallverh%C3%BCtungsvorschrift...

Right, and that is probably a negligible cost as you can get first aid training for free in a lot of places. The point is the op is advocating that businesses be required to buy expensive equipment that they themselves probably wouldn't be willing to spend the money on.

Re: The Fight

#59

Post by rdl »

All reasonably-sized gyms should have Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs). CPR on its own is not incredibly useful on its own (although it does buy you time for paramedics to arrive).

They're only about $1k, which is about 25% of one of the treadmills. I'm surprised it's not mandated by law.

Re: The Fight

#60

Post by graeme »

carbocation wrote: post #56
graeme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for that? Cardiac arrest is a pretty major malfunction. I'll grant that there may be a few cases of spontaneous malfunction among people with systems functioning optimally. But I'd wager that given the knowledge someone had cardiac arrest, the odds of something being wrong with their system are higher than 99.999%. Specifically, I'd be interested in cases of spontaneous cardiac arrest among h…

See my parallel comment. Aside from a possible genetic defect, it's quite possible that this person is healthy by all normally measured features. In the general case, a hunter gatherer lifestyle would likely have triggered this sooner, if anything.

A genetic defect, if not impacted by lifestyle, would do the trick. However, 'normally measured features' may not fully capture cardiac health.

I'd still like to see studies of cardiac arrest among hunter gatherers, or as another poster commented, primates. Lots of genetic problems can be impacted by lifestyle (epigenetics).

I don't know about about the condition you posted to say how lifestyle affects gene expression in that case.

Assuming the disease isn't strongly affected by gene expression, my statistics are likely off then. Wikipedia listed the condition as having a .2-.5% prevalence.

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