Saturday, January 28, 2006

Heart-Stopping Odds

Say you're going to experience cardiac arrest. You can either be in a hospital, or a Las Vegas casino. Which location gives you better odds?

Vegas, baby.

"Medical research shows that casino visitors whose hearts suddently stop survive at higher rates even than people who happen to go into cardiac arrest while visiting a hospital. 'The safest place in America to suffer cardiac arrest is a casino,' says Bryan Bledsoe, a George Washington University emergency-medicine doctor and co-author of textbooks for paramedics." (Wall St. Journal, Weekend Edition, Jan 28-29 '06)

According to the Journal article, this is mostly due to a one-man crusade on the part of Richard Hardman, a local paramedic who had originally studied to be a doctor. He campaigned to get the casinos to install defibrillators and to train their security guards to use them.

The empirical success of the casino's defibrillator program was, ahem, shocking.

It helps, of course, that all the time you're in a casino you're being monitored by remote control cameras.

Hardman is still a paramedic, but says he no longer feels bad about not becoming a doctor, since he figures that he has accomplished something huge anyway.

So, for cardiac arrest,
The location I suggest
Is Sin City in Nevada
Where they happen to have a lotta
Guards waiting to restart
Your heart.

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