How do they work and for what purpose?
In: Technology
There are cells in the heart that set the pace of a heartbeat and they use an electric charge to tell the rest of the cells when to beat. If you have an abnormal heart rhythm it means your cells aren’t sending that electric charge correctly. The defib sends a charge through all of the heart cells to basically reset them, in the hopes that your natural rhythm takes back over
They are used to literally shock a stopped heart into beating regularly again. The paddles are charged with electricity and applied to the chest to send a strong pulse to the heart. It is not only for stopped heart beats, it can correct too-rapid heart rates and also uneven beating.
Some internal devices handle this on a much smaller level, for folks whose hearts have a tendency to become irregualr often.
It stops the bad heartbeat, so that you can give a new, “good” heartbeat by CPR.
Unlike in tv, where the defi gives a new heartbeat after cardiac arrest. This is wrong.
When I was in school, I thought of it like a slap across the face of a hysterical person to get them to stop what they are doing and get back to business, except in electronic form. Like explained earlier, if its stopped, its stopped and this electronic “reset” button can’t get it back up and running. If its sputtering and unorganized, there’s a chance that might.
Let’s start with this: in real life, a defibrillator does NOT work on a heart that is not beating.
Your heart “beating” is caused by the muscles in your heart squeezing (contracting) to force blood through your blood vessels. The timing of each squeeze is synchronized and controlled using an electrical signal generated by special cells in your heart.
Sometimes that electrical signal gets messed up, and different parts of your heart will be squeezing at all different times, at the wrong times, and at the wrong pace. Certain messed up patterns of electrical stimulation and squeezing is called “fibrillation”.
Picture a string of lights, where each bulb is flashing on and off. “Normal” is for the bulbs to all be in sync, with all of them flashing on at the same time, and then all flashing off. But somehow, each bulb is on its own timer, and while they *should* all be set to the same time, they got out of sync and now lights are flickering on and off at random.
A defibrillator sends a huge electric shock through the heart, which overrides the signals its producing itself. This stops the fibrillation by causing one massive, fully-synchronized squeeze across the entire thing. For the string of lights, this is like surging energy through them so they all turn on and stay on.
The goal of this is that, after you remove that shock, your heart has a small break from the fibrillation freak out to try to re-establish a normal rhythm; the flashing string of lights were ALL on at the same time due to the surge, so hopefully they now all flash off at the same time next time, and stay in sync.
This is similar to a “pacemaker”. Some people’s special heart cells in charge of beginning the normal electrical signal and establishing the healthy beating rhythm don’t work. So we put a small device that helps give the first few cells a little jolt with the right rhythm, and the rest of the heart is able to follow suit.
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