This study asked an interesting question: “Is it safe for a rescuer to continue chest compressions during defibrillation of a rescuee?”
You’d think that with the high voltages involved, and mental images of TV doctors yelling “CLEAR!” before defibrillating, there’s no way it could be safe. Apparently, for a gloved rescuer, even with a “worst-case” […]

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This study has been making the rounds lately in the news. The evidence as analyzed in the article supports the assertion that moderate drinking is cardioprotective in middle age.
HOWEVER
What I have not seen in the reviews of the article are mentions of which kind of alcohol are significantly protective. (Perhaps because people are just reviewing […]

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We do a lot of really cool and scientifically interesting stuff in both our lab and the field as a whole. We have now developed our technology to the point where we can take an MRI scan of a heart and develop a complete model, with accurate fiber directions from diffusion tensor data, in a […]

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Nearly one year ago, I raised some questions about the safeguards present on ICDs and pacemakers, especially given the expansion of longer-range (”wandless”) telemetry.
Now a group of researchers has gotten access to a device without the normal accompanying computer hardware, normally called a “programmer”. They do note that it required expensive equipment at a […]

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Clinical Cases and Images has a nice post up with a set of links to and explanations of various ECG/EKG learning tools. They are introduced as follows:

To provide some background, I am a teaching attending at Cleveland Clinic and have multiple rotations during the year with our residents and medical students. We record all topics […]

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