If someone has a cardiac arrest. Are there any scientific double blind or other studies that prove that......

Question

emergency medical intervention is superior than simply doing nothing or doing something else like annointing the patient with colloidal silver on the forhead?

Answer 1

No.  That would be considered unethical.  To do such a study, you would have to randomize people to either the treatment arm (doing all the stuff we are taught to do in ACLS..Advanced Cardiac Life Support) or doing something else, plus there would have to be a valid placebo.  I cant' think of a way to do placebo shock treatments.

Similar things have been done in animal studies of course, but not to study "alternative" ways of resuscitation.  Just to compare things that are plausible for biochemical or physiological reasons.

ACLS for cardiac arrest is continually being updated...which"drugs to use, how many joules of electricity to use for defibrillation, the value of just doing chest compressions alone or do they have to be ventilated as well etc.

We do know that doing nothing doesn't work very well, which is to say, they die.  We also know that the best outcomes are for those who get bystander CPR right away, as most cardiac arrest is due to an arrhythmia, like ventricular fibrillation, and time is muscle.  

Even so, the statistics on people surviving to hospital discharge after being resuscitated are not good.

Answer 2

Double blind research would be unethical. The type of research that would be done here would be done by taking case histories of cardiac patients  and what methods were used and and track rate of survival per method. In addition they may track how the patients fared relative to specific after effects of heart attack and severity of heart attack and track those variables relative to methods used. They would have to run this study in multiple hospitals or for a long period of time in order to collect a large enough sample group to track trends.

You may like to look into some medical research journals to see what types of studies have been done in this area if this is of interest to you. Research of the heart is extensive and I am sure that studies of this nature exist.

Perhaps you can go to medical school and figure out ethical methods to study and answer these questions.

Answer 3

Nope.  The situation you're describing is parallel to one in a book called "How doctors think."

In it, one of the top cardiac surgeons in the US explained that the medical literature said "you only operate on a baby's heart which has a hole between the two ventricles if there is at least a 2-1 ratio of blood backflow."  He had seen plenty of patients which had the ability to live fine with that ratio and not need surgery, so eventually he looked into the the source, and it was the median of a vote by a council (aka not in anyway scientifically tested), so he got the procedure for heart surgeons officially changed.

To quote him "there are certain things that you really cannot test scientifically, and a lot of what we do is essentially guesswork.  To have actually gotten the correct information, we would have needed a lot of volunteers and then tracked them over their entire life, a prohibitively expensive study with major ethical implications for those who died.  Since that's not an option we have to use educated guesses instead."

To my knowledge, the only time data of this nature was available was during the Halocast in concentration camps, which is actually where a large part of current medicine comes from (but that's a bit harder to prove).  If you were back then, the questions you're asking would have been testable, nowadays it isn't.  Instead we have simply have to go with the unscientific approach which has "no proof."  If someone has a heart attack and no intervention, then they probably will die.

For what it's worth though, I think feeding someone capsicum or giving them an intravenous injection of hydrogen peroxide into a blood vessel feeding the heart are the two best options available for stopping a heart attack, but they have falling out of favor for defibrillators (which cost more).

Answer 4

Yes.....the CDC keeps robust stats on the number of patients who die horribly because they were unable to obtain emergency medical intervention.

However, a double blind study would be unethical (not to mention illegal) for this type of situation.  So you'll have to settle for the correct scientific methodology.

BTW, colloidal silver does nothing, whether you "anoint a person on the forehead" with it (lol), or injest it.  It has no treatment effect whatsoever for any condition.  The best thing I can say about it is it's probably not toxic like other heavy metals (mercury, cadmium, lead etc.)  The only heavy metal that has a treatment effect is gold.  Gold has some worth for treating inflammatory arthritis. However, far superior treatments exist these days.

Answer 5

Are you serious?!?!?!  When people go into cardiac arrest, there's no studying.  It's fix the problem, or the person dies.  It would be highly unethical to even suggest using the person for a study.  If you think annointing a person with colloidal silver will work, then start the study the same way all other accepted medical practices are originally studied.  Get yourself some lab rats, trigger a heart attack, annoint some with colloidal silver and do nothing with the control group.  If those with the silver consistently fair better than the control, then you have .evidence that it works.  WHEN they all die, make sure you report your findings to the rest of the nuts that think that colloidal silver heals everything

Answer 6

There is no "study" on that one.  Much investigation has gone into the emergency treatment, evaluating different protocols for the best results.  I think the "one-hour window" is still necessary.