Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

As a critical care nurse, the miraculous CPR recoveries are such a horrible disservice to our patients and their families. CPR is not two minutes of some light exercise and then the person wakes up and is ok forever.

It's 20-30 mins of intense, brutal, scary, undignified activity followed by best case scenario, we put you in the ICU, deliberately make you hypothermic for a day or two, and hope you wake up. That increases your chances of surviving the incident to a whopping 64%.

Surviving to discharge and having a meaningful recovery is a whole other ballgame, and depends a lot on the condition you were in when you had cardiac arrest in the first place. Your elderly grandpa with cancer, sepsis, bad kidneys, etc. is probably not going to go home. Your middle-aged wife who came in because she was having a heart attack actually stands a good chance.

Movies like to show people shocking a flatlined patient who just pops up and walks away when in reality presenting fully flatlined means you're 2-3 times less likely to be resuscitated at all.

I'm happy to leave some leeway in fictionalized depictions of medical care for the sake of story progression. But the complete ignorance currently common in fictional resuscitation scenarios feeds a really malignant sort of magical thinking that keeps us torturing elderly people. I'd really appreciate less of that in my job.

Fuckin a that's a great idea. But also, violent death should be portrayed more accurately. Less John Wick, more Saving Private Ryan. Less cool, more horror. Lot more horror.

Our wish to protect our youth from depictions of horror is very heavily contributing to our worlds problems, in a very large number of ways. They're frankly just deciding they're perfectly okay with actually just doing it irl, far too commonly. Not knowing how it'd actually look and feel is a major component of this imo.

Using a single punch as a quick way to knock someone out and they're just fine when they wake up is my pet peave. Any hit hard enough to cause a blackout is likely to bring long term damage.

"Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,"

Is a gunshot wound not considered a natural death in America?

What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father's fatal lung cancer, ten years later?

This would be very affirming to see represented honestly.

I just had my second Christmas without my dad because of cancer, and there are moments when I still feel like I am in the hospital room watching him die. It’s hard to even talk about because it seems like two years later it shouldn’t hurt so bad and I don’t think people really understand how grief works.

Somebody gets knocked out, wakes up THE NEXT FUCKING DAY as if they had a good night's sleep, get up and walk away.

If you get a blow to the head and you're out for more than 10 seconds, you'll likely have damage. If you're out for minutes, you're likely having lasting issues and a long recovery period.

Similarly : people being sedated with a towel with chloroform, or a dart in the neck and they wake up the next day. I'm far from being an expert but I do know it's VERY hard to keep him and unconscious safely, it's why anesthesiologists make so much money. If you take someone out the other way there is a good chance they simply won't wake up.

Lol last night we were watching Reacher, the dude received head trauma from multiple sources including a baseball swung crowbar to the side of the head, THEN he drowned a little bit. He finished killing all the bad guys and goes home for a nice hot recovery shower. Dude definitely suffered some brain trauma but a hot rinse and he's all good.

I feel strongly about this. People are clueless thanks to these depictions.

CPR works outside the hospital 5% of the time and inside the hospital 20% of the time. If you need CPR, you're very, very likely going to die. Those that do recover are often permanently disabled.

The article mentions the depictions of recoveries several times. Getting CPR and then getting up off the ground, or walking out of the hospital the next day. Nah. Usually there's days or weeks in the hospital and months of rehab.

I also think realistic depictions of shootings and shooting deaths would significantly reduce gun violence. Even the movies that show over-the-top blood splatter and stuff fail to capture the actual gore and misery of someone dying from gunshots, bleeding out alone.

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.

The next day? In the first Jurassic Park movie, the kid gets CPR and is running away from dinosaurs minutes later!

What do you mean I can't just "walk it off" if I get shot right next to my heart?