How A Toilet Plunger Improved CPR

The fixation on comparing this to a toilet plunger is unnecessary and somewhat off-putting, but yes, this is pretty common nowadays. The LUCAS is a huge help and makes running a cardiac arrest feasible with a crew of 2-3 people, previously it required a larger team and lots of switching out who was doing chest compressions. It also makes it much easier to move a patient while CPR is in progress since you don’t need to pause compressions moving in and out of the back of an ambulance, etc.

They do tend to be… rougher… apparently they do _such good_ CPR that the risk of damaging the great vessels is much higher than with manual CPR, but I think the tradeoff of getting consistent chest compression quality works out in favor of it still.

There’s a saying in EMS: “lift with your firefighter, not with your back!”. My heart goes out to any firefighters named Lucas.

* ...reported results from 380 patients who could not be revived by defibrillation, making their odds of survival particularly bleak. Among those who received the new CPR method within 11 minutes of cardiac arrest, 6.1 percent survived with brain function intact, compared with just 0.6 percent who received traditional CPR.*

6% of 380 is 22.8 people, 6.1% is 23.18 persons. This makes no sense, and is also not remotely statistically significant. What am I missing?