The New Life-Saving CPR Technique

Dr. Travis Stork: There’s a new kind of CPR, it’s actually called Cardiocerebral Resuscitation, not CPR -- but CCR and it does have a lot of controversies surrounding it.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Well, it’s this idea that should you do mouth to mouth resuscitation, doesn’t make the difference. And if you ask people, you know, would they be willing to help somebody who’s suddenly collapsed, people will say yes. But the actual number of people who help is very small. If you purse that down, it’s because they’re a little awkward about doing the mouth-to-mouth, they are not quite sure how to do it and that’s how the CCR sort of developed.

Dr. Travis Stork: And CPR for people who aren’t well-versed in it is intimidating. It’s hard. People fail CPR, it’s an intimidating idea of how many compression. So let’s teach people very quickly the simplest type of CPR -- CCR compression. You find someone down.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: You find someone down, and you want to make sure they’re on a hard flat surface, this comes up a lot. But basically, there’s really nothing to this, as you know, better than anybody Travis, really dominant hand down, right in the middle of the chest, throttle the fingers, get your arms straight over the chest like this, so you really getting around the course.

Dr. Travis Stork: Look at how Sanjay is using his body weight to give the compressions, you need to compress the chest at least two inches because you’re idea is you’re pumping blood from the heart to the brain, to the other important organs, so it’s got to be two inches, you want to do 100 beats per minutes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: But you’re essentially acting as a heart pump right now. Patient has a plenty of oxygen in the blood, I just need to move that oxygenated blood all around his body.

Dr. Travis Stork: For every minute that you withhold chest compression and resuscitation, the chance survival drops 10%. This is a situation where seconds, not even minutes, do count. But if you do this simple exercise, call 911, there is hope and if there’s an AED available, get it to the patient side, it’s very easy to use.