AED Safety

“In 1978 the same year he won election to the first of his five terms as a Wyoming congressman, Dick Cheney had his first heart attack. He suffered another attack in 1984 and then a third in 1988 at age 47, but heart bypass surgery stabilized his condition until November 2000” (Pampel, Pauley). While many of us live a very healthy lifestyle, there are people in the same predicament as Mr. Cheney. We all life life, working and playing and eating, etc. Some individuals can’t partake in those activities because they suffer from cardiac problems. According to USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education): “More than 2,600 Americans die each day from cardiovascular diseases, an average of a death every 33 seconds and “At least 250,000 individuals a year die of heart attack within one hour of the onset of symptoms and before they reach a hospital.” The Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) is a pinnacle of medical technology that can save anyone’s life no matter what the environment maybe.

The first modern external defibrillation of human was conducted in the summer of ‘56 by Paul Zoll (We may recognize this procedure from what we have seen on television where we’ve seen the ER doctor hold two paddles that have been gelled with paste on a patient’s chest and yell clear before he shocked him with about 3000 volts of electricity. The doctor had to yell “clear” in order to ensure that no one that was standing near would get explicitly shocked. Claude Beck (1894-1971) was a pioneer of heart surgery, he focused on operations to improve circulation in damaged heart muscles. He also developed ways to revive heart attack victims, including the defibrillator and CPR (AED). In 1947, Beck successfully defibrillated his first patient, a 14-year-old boy whose heart went into fibrillation after an operation. The defibrillator used on this patient was made by James Rand, a friend of Beck. It had silver paddles (the size of large tablespoons) that were used in