What problems can defibrillators fix, and why can’t we use them with all cases? Why is there, apparently, a time limit on their use for a patient?
In: Biology
The heart is several muscles working together, if they stop working together, no blood gets pumped.
All the muscles doing their own thing randomly and not pumping blood is called fibrillation.
So how do you fix it?
**YOU TURN IT OFF AND ON AGAIN**
The defibrillator is the turning it off part.
It briefly shuts down everything in the heart, by overpowering every other signal.
Then you use stuff like CPR to hopefully turn it on again.
Hopefully rebooting the heart fixes the problem.
But not everything can be solved by a reboot, and often it just stop it from killing the patient then and there, but not fix the underlying problem, such as the thing that’s supposed to coordinating the heart not working.
Do note, if the heart is already stopped, turning it off does absolutely nothing. This is something sooooo many medical dramas get wrong.
As for the time limit, the heart not pumping due to fibrillation means blood isn’t flowing to the brain, so the brain dies. Also the heart it self needs blood too, so that dying as well is really bad.
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