Anything that encourages more people to do CPR when they’re confronted with a situation that requires that kind of intervention is to be warmly welcomed because studies show that people who get CPR, even when it’s done poorly, are 3-4 times more likely to survive a cataclysmic heart stoppage than people who don’t receive CPR.
But one of the reasons lots of people offer for not using CPR when they could have done so is that they weren’t sure of what to do, so they decided, they say subsequently, that it was better at the time to do nothing than to do something that might have made matters worse, although what could be worse than a dead person lying in front of you is hard for me to figure out.
Anyway, the good news is that according to a tiny study from the University of Illinois, it’s easy to learn to do proper CPR, and it’s all to do with that conundrum that afflicts most Jewish men, namely rhythm.
Thus, it’s generally agreed that CPR is best done at a rhythm of roughly 100-110 chest compressions per minute, so this guy in Illinois taught the study participants to do CPR to the Bee Gee’s hit from the seventies, Stayin’ Alive, which apparently has the perfect rhythm to learn proper CPR.
But on the assumption that it’s unlikely that you’d have the Bee Gees around when you need to do CPR, the professor re-tested the students 5 weeks later sans disco music to see if they could still do CPR well, and happily, they still did the CPR to an appropriate rhythm, albeit a little bit faster than when Stayin’ Alive was playing in the background.
There is one sad note to add, however: it seems that 13 of the 15 students had to undergo intense therapy for several weeks later in order to stop that tune from playing constantly in their brains.
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