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
There are lots of things that can cause a heart to stop. It can be internal bleeding, lack of oxygen to the heart muscles, neurological issues, various drugs, etc. It is not possible to start a heart without fixing the reason it stopped. And once you have solved this the heart will usually start on its own without any help.
The problem is that a stopped heart will not pump blood around the body and will therefore not provide itself with oxygen and eventually the neurons and other cells start to die. It is therefore very important to start chest compressions as soon as possible to manually pump blood around the body. In some rare cases the body is able to fix whatever is wrong on its own and the heart will start but this is very rare and most of the time you need to do chest compressions until a doctor is able to fix whatever is wrong.
You may have seen defibrillators being used. This is very commonly seen in TV and movies. There is a trope that a defibrillator can start a heart but this is not the case. The heart may go into fibrillation where the heart muscles gets out of sync. This means the heart is not working well if at all. It is still alive and moving but is not pumping blood around the body. There may be several different reasons for this to occur. It can happen as the heart is starting up but it is usually caused by other things. The defibrillator is used to fix the fibrillation. But it is not used when the heart is not beating.
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