So if a heart stops you can massage, pump or shock it back to life, and surgeons even stop a heart on purpose before firing it back up, so why can’t they do that 100 percent of the time? What is it that makes a heart stop and never come back? If the brain is working then surely the heart should always come back?
In: Biology
Warning: the following text is not suitable for actual 5 year olds. I’m discussing life/death/CPR on the emotional level of an adult.
If a heart stops, it’s done and there is (currently) no way to get it restarted and the patient will die within minutes. In some cases a heart transplant might save them, but there is no way to live with the original heart.
However, what we often *call* a stopped heart, like in a heart attack, is not literally a stopped heart. The heart is still beating, but in a messed up rhythm, so not enough blood is pumped around. Like a factory worker that’s dancing instead of moving packages from left to right. Shocking the heart can work to change the rhythm back to a normal rhythm.
Massaging/pumping as in CPR does nothing to help or change the heart’s rhythm. What you’re doing is basically emptying the heart (when you push down), and refilling it (when you let go). That way you make the blood circulate through the body, artificially. The person doing CPR is doing the pumping, not the heart. This helps moving oxygen to the rest of the body, most importantly the brain, so there’s less damage by lack of oxygen after the heart gets shocked back into a normal rhythm.
Lmk if you need an ELI4 version of this!
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