It's Back to Basics to Save a Life

Aug. 24 -- SUNDAY, Aug. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Medics and doctors are used to participating in a flurry of activity when trying to save a person who's had a cardiac arrest -- inserting IVs, placing a breathing tube, performing defibrillation to restart the heart.

But studies now show that none of those advanced techniques saves lives as well as ordinary cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. And what's more, those studies have also found that a truncated version of CPR that tosses out mouth-to-mouth in favor of simple and sustained chest compressions increases survival rates dramatically.

"It's been shown to work, while these other things have not been shown to improve survival," said Dr. Alex Garza, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. "They were just things we thought would be good."

"The important thing now is to step back, do chest compressions and proceed methodically," he said.

Both the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association have endorsed chest compressions as an acceptable alternative for people who witness a cardiac arrest but aren't trained in CPR.

By simplifying the process, they hope to get more bystanders to step in and perform chest compressions on the ailing person until help arrives. The American Heart Association estimates that fewer than a third of those who suffer cardiac arrest in a public place receive any form of CPR.

Bystanders simply are "worried about making an error, and they forget a lot of the steps," said Dr. Marc Eckstein, associate professor of emergency medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and medical director of the Los Angeles Fire Department. "Mouth-to-mouth is complex, and many people are reluctant to perform it. Performing compression only, the results are comparable to full CPR -- and you can teach someone to do it in a matter of minutes."