Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

2348 readers

102 users here now

Health: physical and mental, individual and public.

Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.

See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.

Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.

Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.

Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.

Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

206

Doctors are pushing Hollywood for more realistic depictions of death and dying on TV (www.npr.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

61 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We've seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.

This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider's biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father's fatal lung cancer, ten years later?

"Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death," says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.

Don't even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people's eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.

All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

From what I understood, defibrillators basically stop the heart, letting it restart on its own in a proper rhythm.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

You are correct, and we actually also use them on people who are not actively dead, but are having a bad heart rhythm that is causing intolerable symptoms.

The shocking dead people to resuscitate them thing, the part that everyone is familiar with, is when the ventricles of someone's heart have started quivering in a chaotic rhythm called ventricular fibrillation or vfib. If someone is experiencing vfib, they're actually dead because vfib invariably degrades into full stop flatline very quickly. Shocking someone in vfib briefly stops their heart in hopes that it will reboot itself into a rhythm that is compatible with life.

But the right atrium can also fall into fibrillation. You've heard about this on TV (if you're in the US); we call that afib. Afib is compatible with life, because the ventricles are the main part of the pump and can continue to beat even if the right atrium goes a little haywire. But often that beating isn't very effective and people will experience low blood pressure and shortness of breath. And the right atrium isn't clearing blood out of itself effectively in afib, which can cause the blood to clot in the heart and lead to a stroke if a piece of clot breaks off.

So, you may be thinking to yourself, wait, ventricular fibrillation we use a defibrillator, so what about atrial fibrillation, and that is correct, we can use a defibrillator to shock someone in afib, reboot their heart, and hope they go back into a normal, more effective rhythm. (We do mildly sedate people before doing that lol.) Sometimes that works, sometimes we have to just control afib with meds and we have to keep them on blood thinners to prevent a clot in the heart.

And lastly, there's a more complicated heart rhythm called Supraventricular Tachycardia or SVT that sometimes also responds to being shocked. We try a couple of other treatments first for SVT, but shocking can work. And again, people are mildly sedated for that.