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HEALTH NEWS
Saving a Life
“S
udden cardiac arrest is a national health crisis,” says Ryan Schaefer. “It is one of the biggest killers in the U.S. today.” CPR can save a life, but Schaefer, an RN and coordinator of electrophysiology at Providence Medical Center, says research showed bystanders weren’t that eager to attempt it in an emergency. They lacked confidence in their skills — that they would remember how to do the breathing and compressions correctly, and in the right ratios. And then there was “the yuck factor,” says Schaefer, meaning people were reluctant to give rescue breaths to someone they didn’t know. Interestingly, research showed that people who did attempt the rescue breathing had a hard time with it, sometimes taking up to 30 seconds to deliver the requisite two breaths, critical time during which the victim was without blood flow. Now, the recommendation is much simpler. “If you see a person that has suddenly collapsed, they are unconscious, they are not responding to any arousal at all, or not breathing at all — they need CPR,” says Schaefer. It’s easy, he says. “The simplicity of CPR is push hard and fast in the middle of the chest until they wake up or help arrives.” If you want to get more technical, the compression rate is about 100 times per minute, at a depth of two inches. Need help keeping time? Try compression to the rhythm of that old — and now aptly named — Bee Gees hit, “Stayin’ Alive.” — ANNE McGREGOR
GOOD READ
Bathing Like Benjamin
D
oes good health play a role in the creative process? It can, argues Mason Currey, who spent more than two years blogging about the way some of the greatest artists and thinkers worked. Now he’s collected his findings in his new book DAILY RITUALS. And while there’s plenty of alcohol and coffee in the 161 short profiles, there are also long walks (Georgia O’Keeffe liked to kill rattlesnakes on her morning constitutionals) and power napping (Frank Lloyd Wright would nod off three times a day). There are some oddballs for sure: Victor Hugo would swallow two raw eggs every morning, while the German poet Friedrich Schiller kept rotting apples in his study; the smell apparently reminded him to get back to work. And Benjamin Franklin swore by his “air bath.” “I rise early every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour,” he wrote in his Autobiography. “And if I return to bed… I make a supplement to my night’s rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined.” Whether it was the bath or the extra two hours of sleep, Franklin’s ritual made his mind really crackle. Mostly these artists share a ferocious focus on their subjects that veers into obsession. There’s probably a gene for that, but that’s another book. — TED S. McGREGOR JR.
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