Yes, it's a wonderful thing to know and use CPR in an emergency such that an individual who might have otherwise died survives.
But let's face it: few people know what to do and even fewer do it when push (on the chest, hard, 60 times a minute) comes to shove.
So here's a tip that might well let you — uninformed, unschooled, and scared — help someone live:
Bend down, pick up their feet, and hold their legs in the air waist-high.
That's it.
By doing so you increase blood return to the central circulation — the heart and lungs, where it's needed to restore spontaneous heartbeat — from the periphery, where it's irrelevant for survival in a circulatory crisis.
Elevating the legs as described above is the equivalent of transfusing two units of blood — 40% of the average adult's total circulating blood volume — and makes CPR much more effective.
The best part is that you can't do any harm.
It's the very first thing I instruct someone to do when I arrive at a Code Blue scene.
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