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CPR is the coolest thing. When it works--which is not often, but still, not never--you're saving someone's life with your hands. So much of modern healthcare is technologically abstracted, is adjusting the numbers on a machine or injecting a nondescript clear liquid into a tube that's attached to a tube that's attached to the patient. But then you get to one of the most desperate interventions, one of most literally life-saving--and it's just hands. You put your hands over someone's heart and you push down hard and you don't stop without a good reason. It's tiring, because you're using your body to power someone else's body. Your heart beats hard with the effort of making someone else's heart beat. Sometimes, if there's nowhere good to stand or the patient is being moved, you have to get on the stretcher with them to do it. Sometimes you have to straddle them. Sometimes you break their bones with your hands.

CPR wasn't codified until 1960 (I think partly because it wasn't all that useful before defibrillators and cardiac medications--CPR is only one link in the Chain Of Survival), but it requires no tools a caveman didn't have. The last resort of the giant international financial and technological and social construction that is Healthcare is to put your hands on the patient's heart, and push down hard.


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