This article is from WeChat official account:LatePost (ID: postlate)< span class="text-remarks">, interview: Yao Yinmi, Shi Xian, editor: Huang Junjie, caption picture from: Visual China
The fear of disease in each generation is a manifestation of the anxiety of the times, and the same is true of sudden death. This fatal sudden heart disease is the most concrete image of fear that a generation wrapped in the “996” work culture can find.
The dying moment occurred one early morning in February 2021, close to three o’clock. 23-year-old Yu Chen works overtime at home. It has been nearly 20 days, and he has stayed up to this time every day. After less than 5 hours of sleep during the working day, he has to get up and prepare to clock in and go to work. When staying up late, as soon as he dozed off, he put the cigarette on, and his consciousness continued in one cigarette after another, supporting him to push the project forward a little bit.
Only that morning, the heart refused to follow Yu Chen and continue to stay in front of the computer for an extra minute. He felt very uncomfortable and lay down and rested quickly, but his thoughts were still flowing, staying up too long, his sympathetic nerves continued to excite and became no longer sensitive. Then, the heart protested. Yu Chen clearly felt the rhythm of the heartbeat: it was very fast for a while, and very slow for a while. After a while, he began to breathless, his eyes turned black, his chest was too tight, and his consciousness became blurred, “the sky is spinning in his head”. He was scared and sat up quickly. “Take a deep breath” he told himself. A few minutes later, he tried to lie down again, the suffocation feeling blocked his chest again.
After tossing several times, the situation has not changed. A thought suddenly flashed: Is it true that in the next second, I will have a cardiac arrest?
He has seen many news about the sudden death of young people on the Internet. Call an ambulance, “I fall down in front of the hospital, and someone will find me.” He thought. But they can’t disturb the family, “If I know that I stay up late to catch up on the project, my parents will definitely scold me.”
Finally, he put on his coat, picked up the car key, and drove to the nearest hospital for emergency. Yu Chen works and lives in Nanjing, and the early winter morning is quiet and cold. As he drove, he thought, it would be a pity if he died like this, he saved so much money and he still hadn’t spent it well.
The emergency doctor gave him an electrocardiogram, measured his blood pressure, and took blood to measure his creatinine. Fortunately, the symptoms did not last long, and he was eventually diagnosed with palpitations and gotThe doctor warned of “Stay up late, drink less coffee and smoke less”.
Many people are not so lucky. On December 3, 2020, a 27-year-old employee of Gome’s Fuzhou branch died suddenly at the year-end oath meeting; 6 days later, a 47-year-old employee of SenseTime Shanghai Company died suddenly on the sofa outside the company’s gym. At the end of the month, a 22-year-old Pinduoduo community group buying employee “Lung Nourishment” died suddenly on the streets of Urumqi at 1 am.
The tragedy happened around us.
Beijing subway Huoying Station, Changping East Station, and Hujialou Station have all experienced sudden deaths that have attracted much attention. Alibaba, ByteDance, JD.com, Meituan and other major Internet companies have reported sudden employee deaths in the past five years.
The scene is changeable. Some of their lives ended in the work station; some ended in the hotel bathroom when they were on a business trip; some played on the court after get off work; some were walking in the community with their family members; and some woke up their wives at two o’clock in the morning and asked for help. It hurts, foaming at the mouth after a few minutes; in other cases, the heart has stopped beating in front of the computer, but new messages are still popping up on WeChat.
More deaths are not known. They died silently, and they were not perceivable by the public just like their lives.
Someone on Zhihu answered anonymously: “Working in a non-Internet company with a high sudden death rate for 8 years, excellent performance. The sudden death of my colleagues has always been a news event and legend, until I witnessed the same A colleague who had just graduated suddenly died in the office building and was carried away from the office building.” No news report of the death has survived to this day.
In September 2020, a public relations company employee worked overtime until more than two in the morning and died suddenly. She lives alone in Beijing. After 90s, she is the fastest promoted and youngest leader in the team. It wasn’t until no one was seen at work the next day that my colleagues realized that something might have happened. There is also no media coverage, if it were not for a mutual friend, I would not know.
In the past, sudden death due to myocardial infarction was a “senile disease”. Now, it is breaking through the lower limit of age year after year. Li Yuehua, who has worked as a doctor in Shanghai Xinhua Hospital for more than 40 years, told me that in the 1980s, the patients with myocardial infarction she treated in the emergency department were all 60-year-old and 70-year-old people. Later, there were 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds. Later, she was also admitted to a 26-year-old patient.
“In China, 544,000 people die suddenly every year.”-This is a data that is frequently quoted fromPopular science reports, to public service advertisements on buses. Doctors often choose another data that is more intuitive and more deterrent: In China, one person suddenly dies every minute.
But this number is neither accurate nor old. “544,000” is derived from a medical follow-up observation statistics conducted by Fuwai Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in 2006.
At that time, experts from Fuwai Hospital followed more than 670,000 people in four cities in China for one year, and counted 2983 deaths, of which 284 were sudden cardiac deaths. From this, it was inferred that the incidence of sudden cardiac death in China was 41.8 per 100,000 people, and then calculated that 544,000 people died suddenly in a year in China. There is no new study to give an accurate number of sudden deaths. Until 2020, the “China Cardiovascular Disease” report issued by the National Cardiovascular Disease Center is still using this calculation result 14 years ago.
In 2006, QQ can be offline, and there is no such never-offline communication tool like WeChat and Dingding. Together with smartphones, people can connect with the company 24 hours a day. Today, young people are facing greater pressure, and the threat of sudden death is even more pervasive. Clinical first-line doctors clearly feel that the incidence of sudden death is higher than before. A medical device entrepreneur estimated that the total number of sudden deaths each year in recent years is “1 million surely.”
This can only be an estimate. In many cases, sudden death is too late for doctors to confirm the cause and cannot be included in statistics.
Smoking, drinking, staying up late, working long hours, constant stress and high pressure… They all can cause a tragedy. After deep talk, you can’t easily persuade these young people to “relax a little”. They are worried about their health, but they also know the cost of not fighting.
Yu Chen was originally a staff member of a state-owned enterprise, with a monthly salary of 6,000 yuan. In his first job in life, he couldn’t persuade him to talk to his nearly 40-year-old colleagues about the house, child, and car tickets every day, and listen to the life philosophy of “You must be down-to-earth and find an honest girl to get married earlier.”
In his spare time, Yu Chen taught himself 3D animation production, picking up odd jobs, drawing pictures after get off work at four in the afternoon, sleeping for a few hours until two or three in the morning, and checking in at the unit at eight. After several months of working two jobs a day, Yu Chen left the state-owned enterprise and opened his own studio.
During the interview, the background sound on the phone was the click of a mouse button. Although he only has one job now, his work pace and lifestyle have not changed much compared with the last time the accident happened. Sometimes, after several shifts in a row, the workThe studio partner asked him seriously: “You said, what should I do if I die suddenly.” Yu Chen laughed after hearing this: “Then give me all your shares.”
Sudden death by accident is indeed terrible, but he has escaped once. Is it because of such a “small probability” that he will return to the boring he has managed to escape from? But now, if you don’t fight a little bit, where can the sense of personal worth and a better life come from?
I advised him: “You should pay more attention to your body.”
He listened: “At my age, if I can’t resist in my twenties, I won’t be able to resist even more in the future. I thought, if I live less than 30 years old, I’ll fall down.”
Reducing the risk of sudden death is simple: a healthier lifestyle and lower emotional stress will do. But people can’t do it. This kind of helplessness exists in everyone’s life to varying degrees. “996” has become popular culture, and people have no choice. Can only rely on external forces.
Unfolding the story of the confrontation between humans and sudden death. Those medical papers, research results, and interview texts formed a “obstructive and difficult” path. Modern medicine has given humans a weapon to resist clinically, but the change in lifestyle makes the sudden death stretch farther and longer.
So the confrontation became complicated. Sudden death became the result, and the life that was about to crush people into a vacuum became an epidemic modern disease.
All accidents have been planned for a long time
Sudden death is usually caused by sudden heart disease, such as cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction. Myocardial infarction can cause ventricular fibrillation, which can be simply and roughly understood as: heart cramps. When a normal person’s heart beats, the waveform is as narrow as a sharp straight line. When ventricular fibrillation occurs, the amplitude of the waveform becomes smaller and the angle becomes larger, and it looks like a small flag is being held.
At this time, the heart cannot pump blood into the brain. Within a few minutes, the human brain began to die.
The first surgeon who successfully used cardiac defibrillation technology to successfully rescue a sudden death patient (Claude Beck) once concluded : Ventricular fibrillation usually occurs in a heart that is “sound” in nature. He has a famous saying “The heart is too good to die(hearts too good to die)“. Clinically, unlike many difficult heart diseases, the heart that undergoes ventricular fibrillation has neither ruptured, nor has it become “rotten like a rag”.
If you search for “sudden death” on Weibo, you can see a lot of worry and fear.
“Anxious and unable to sleep at night, I have been thinking about making progress during the day. I feel a little tingling in my heart all night for fear of sudden death.”
“Frequent nine-to-nine meetings, my job is spent overtime. Do event planning, material design, procurement, advertising, tweet writing, H5, exhibition follow-up, various reports…Quickly It’s the critical point of sudden death.”
“Working overtime for several days until two or three o’clock in the morning, nausea and vomiting, continued premature beats, dizzy eyes… I feel like I am the next employee of a business unit that suddenly died on the news.”
There is a data in Dr. Ding Xiang’s “2021 National Health Insight Report”: 52% of respondents are worried that they will die suddenly.
In fear, some people have stopped staying up all night and working overtime endlessly, but they still haven’t escaped the curse of sudden death.
On the evening of January 5, 2021, fashion blogger Xiaoya died of a cardiac arrest on a late night flight from Beijing to Shanghai. Xiaoya was a well-known blogger who wears clothes before her death, with 1.41 million followers on her Weibo account “Yarlung Zangbo River Woman”.
The working hours and locations of well-known bloggers are not fixed. They change cities frequently and work until three or four in the morning. Xiaoya used to be too. During her lifetime, she and her friend Chen Huan rarely chatted during the day, often at two or three in the morning.
When the news first came out, my friends didn’t believe it. After all, Xiaoya was born in sports since she was a child and maintains a regular running habit all year round. Moreover, for the sake of health, Xiaoya now even adjusts her work and rest to normal: go to bed at twelve o’clock and start at eight o’clock in the morning. But it wasn’t until Xiaoya’s several social accounts posted obituaries of the same content that everyone “slowly accepted this fact” in their hearts.
As a good friend, Chen Huan witnessed Xiaoya’s step-by-step accumulation of fame from scratch. She knew that Xiaoya had been strong since she was a child. “Not only is she good at sports, but her grades will never fall.” The competition among fashion bloggers is very fierce. There are various brand activities, fashion festivals, and publicity endorsements. There are several times a week. You still cannot refuse. “If you refuse an opportunity, they mayYou are not the one who is looking for. “
The rhythm of life can be forcibly adjusted, but the mental pressure cannot be relieved. Sometimes Xiaoya is so tired that she will fly back to her hometown, Chongqing, to gather with her friends, but leave in a hurry a few hours later and rush back to continue working.
Since the late 1950s, there have been medical papers in Europe and the United States studying the relationship between mental stress and sudden death. Drexel(Drexel)University School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, an academic article in 2006 suggested that depression, Anxiety is a known important factor that may affect heart abnormalities. Another paper in a European academic journal showed that: Psychological and emotional stress within one month before the event is a moderately powerful trigger for sudden cardiac death.
Unfortunately, sudden death cannot be effectively prevented. Even if an extra cardiac examination is added to the annual regular physical examination, it cannot help a person predict whether he is at risk of sudden death-only people who have experienced a heart attack will have a significant change in their ECG.
Some people carry nitroglycerin with them, but the cardiologist’s warning is: such prescription drugs must not be eaten casually. If you are not careful, you can eat yourself to death. Suxiao Jiuxin Pill is even more useless in terms of its ingredients.
Some high-risk factors of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are regarded as risk factors that may cause sudden death. For example: hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, hyperuricemia. Corresponding to people’s daily life style, it is reflected in the amount of daily exercise, whether there is smoking, drinking habits, whether the diet structure is balanced, and whether the high-intensity work hours are too long.
Smoking is the most harmful. The global standard “Mersk Diagnostics Manual” of the medical reference book records that smokers who smoke 20 or more cigarettes a day have a three-fold increase in the risk of heart attack in men and six-fold increase in women’s compared with non-smokers. After quitting smoking, the risk will be reduced to half.
Dr. Wang Su of the Department of Cardiology, Beijing Anzhen Hospital, is a post-85s and an active medical writer on Dingxiang. He is good at teaching the public to medical science in plain and easy-to-understand language. He said that the biggest danger of tobacco is that it will produce “a lot of grass-headed” chemical components when it is burned. When human lungs exchange gas, they “will collect all the gas you breathe in.” “Grass-headed.” “Since the ingredients are organic elements, they are soluble in blood, and follow the heart’s pumping function to “running around”, causing irreversible damage to blood vessel cells. Over time, plaques are formed, which poses a great risk.
The benefits of quitting smoking can be seen immediately, “Quit smoking today, benefit today.” Wang Su said. Atomized e-cigarette cartridges and fully heated e-cigarettes like IQOS are not recommended.
Some reminders of the body are often ignored. For example, always having chest pain may not be good. But most people don’t go to the hospital right away. “Only when it hurts for half an hour or an hour do you think that you have not seen it for so long. Let’s go to the hospital.” Tsinghua University has ten years of medical experience. Said Xu Haijun, an emergency physician at the First Affiliated Hospital.
There are also some more hidden symptoms that the person does not know is a major problem, and only experienced emergency doctors can predict them.
During the Spring Festival of 2021, a 27-year-old boy drank and vomited at a class reunion, and was taken to the emergency department where Xu Haijun was located by a 120 ambulance. After giving the patient the antiemetic medicine, the other party said that his chest was not very comfortable. Generally speaking, drinking and vomiting can cause a burning sensation in the chest, but Xu Haijun heard the patient’s description and found it strange, so he took the initiative to give him an electrocardiogram, and judged that a blood vessel in the patient’s heart might be blocked. As soon as Xu Haijun and his colleagues pushed the patient into the rescue room, the patient suffered a respiratory and cardiac arrest. After “the kind of TV show” emergency heart compressions and electric shocks, the person was finally rescued, leaving no sequelae.
“People who are only 27 years old have such serious problems with their heart and blood vessels.” Xu Haijun sighed. This patient is also engaged in IT. He has just returned from studying abroad. He is a staff member of a certain unit. His body is a little bit fat, but he is not obese, and his blood pressure or blood sugar is not particularly high. He usually smokes. “There is no sudden death for no reason, all accidents are planned for a long time.” He said.
Through the symptoms shown by patients, the pain they experience at that moment can be reversed.
People with sudden cardiac death have sudden loss of consciousness, irregular breathing, and body convulsions. 70% of patients with myocardial infarction will feel chest tightness, chest pain, and sweating profusely. 30% will experience the horrible “feeling of death”-intense, continuous, and compressive pain in the heart. Wang Su described it as “like a large stone slab of several hundred catties pressed on his chest.”
Sudden cardiac death only takes a few minutes to cause insufficient blood supply to the brain. “Once the brain does not listen, the bladder and sphincter will go crazy.” Wang Su said.
He once went to the emergency room and saw the embarrassment of patients with sudden cardiac death. The person fell on the ground, foaming at the mouth, convulsing all over, and the body was soft.Lower body, a pool-incontinence, feces and urine, a pair of pants.
Validity and invalidity of “life-saving artifact”
The former Beijing Emergency Medical Center senior emergency doctor Zhang Yuanchun once said in the health talk show column “Talking” that I have been engaged in emergency work for 10 years and only saved one sudden cardiac death patient.
In the case of sudden death, the blockage occurs in the slender cardiovascular system, and the blockage location can only be seen with the aid of cardiography. An opening is made in the forearm, and the inner diameter of the sheath used to conduct the contrast agent is only 2 mm. The sheath enters through the blood vessels on the forearm, through the upper arm, through the collarbone, and into the heart all the way. This road of blood vessels that travels through the human body can be 1.5 to 1.8 meters long, and if the patient is tall, it will be more than 2 meters.
With the help of contrast agents, doctors see images of the patient’s cardiovascular system. The blood vessels extend from the aorta, branching, getting thinner and more numerous, like the roots of a big tree. The place where the branch stops is where the blood vessel is blocked. The heart is a blood-forming organ, any blockage may kill people within a few minutes.
Time is demanding and demanding from human beings, and the success rate of rescue of patients with sudden cardiac death is calculated per minute.
An academic paper from the Emergency Department of Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University mentioned: People who receive treatment within 3 minutes of sudden cardiac arrest have a survival rate of more than 70%; more than 4 minutes, the patient’s brain cells will be insufficiently supplied. Gradually die; within 5 minutes, the patient’s survival rate becomes 60%; after ten minutes, the survival rate drops to almost zero.
At present, in China, it takes an average of 15 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene from the clinic visit. It is not realistic to expect the ambulance to arrive in time. Ge Junbo, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in The Lancet in 2016 that less than 1% of people who die of sudden cardiac death in China each year are successfully rescued.
People at the scene can provide some more timely help. For example, heart pressing (but the probability of saving people is very small). Electric shock is the only effective method. In the past, only hospitals had such electrical equipment. Beginning in the 1950s, doctors in Europe and the United States went through various trials and iterated batches of products, resulting in the AED that is widely known today.
The full name of AED is Automatic External Defibrillator. Cardiac arrest will cause the original rhythmic electrical signalThe conduction path changes, and several signals are stacked in a disorderly manner. The myocardium “I don’t know whom to listen to.” Each strand of the myocardium is beating according to its own rhythm. As a result, the entire heart is convulsing. The principle of AED is to apply a strong current, just like someone knocking on a gong in a noisy market to suppress all the noise and tell the heart muscle to “listen to me”. By beating at this beat, the heart resumes its proper rhythm.
This strong instantaneous electric current is between 120 and 200 joules, and the instantaneous voltage can rise to 2500~2700 volts, which is more than ten times the 220 volts of household electricity. If the two electrode pads of the AED are brought close and discharged in the laboratory, a strong arc can be seen, and the electric spark will pass with a “slap”.
Claude Baker was the first to successfully use electric shock defibrillation. In 1947, when he performed thoracotomy on a 14-year-old boy, the patient died suddenly. Baker connected the defibrillator he designed directly to the heart and saved the patient.
Over 70 years of improvement, defibrillation equipment has made great progress. The AED does not require an open chest, no power supply, or even a professional physician.
AED is equivalent to “point and shoot camera”. From the moment the AED is activated, there will be voice instructions to guide the user through the steps, and the machine can autonomously determine whether electric shock defibrillation is needed. But in actual use, human judgment is still inevitable. For example, if you encounter people with extremely thick chest hair, you must shave off the chest hair first to ensure that the electrodes are tightly attached.
Because of its ease of use and good effect, AED is known as a “life-saving artifact”. AED has been promoted in developed countries for many years. In 1999, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the AED device for clinical use. In 2000, former US President Clinton gave a radio speech to the people of the United States on AED products. Since 2004, the Japanese imperial family has promoted AED to the public.
However, its domestic popularity and coverage are far from enough. The “Expert Consensus on the Layout and Delivery of AEDs in China” published in the Chinese Journal of Emergency Medicine in August 2020 pointed out that according to current literature data, the average number of AEDs per 100,000 people: the United States There are 700 units, Japan has 276 units, and Shenzhen is ranked first among Chinese cities with 17.5 units.
No one knows how difficult it is to promote it better than AED popular science people.
Yang Guang is a lecturer who specializes in first aid training in the northern region, and also acts as an agent for AED sales. His observation is:Not so many companies have the consciousness to proactively purchase AEDs for their employees. “Many units purchasing AEDs are still a little mere formality,” he said.
Because the management process needs to meet the safety certification qualification, the competent unit is mandatory to be equipped with AED. After all, it is a matter of face. After some companies have installed the AED, they will lock the door with a lock and give the key to a specific worker for safekeeping. The market price of a domestic AED is 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, and the cost is not low. Others were equipped with equipment, but did not organize employees to receive first aid training and annual retraining, and AED became a decoration.
There are even fewer AEDs that fall into the public scene.
Xiaoya was on a Eastern Airlines flight at the time of the accident. At the end of April 2021, we interviewed a flight attendant of Eastern Airlines. The other party replied that there are more AEDs on some longer international flights, but currently Domestic short-haul flights are not yet equipped.
Although some subway lines in Beijing are now equipped with AEDs, it is difficult for people to notice their presence when traveling in a hurry. However, at interchange stations with larger areas and more complex routes, when the flow of people is intensive, the time to pick up and deliver the AED is also full of uncertainty.
“To be honest, suppose I suddenly fall here now. A first responder can find the AED and save me in a radius of one kilometer or two kilometers? I’m not sure that such a lucky thing will happen.” Yang Just say.
The place where we talked is near Tuanjiehu subway station, close to one of Beijing’s most well-known business districts, Sanlitun. I opened the map to search for the AED near the point, and the nearest one was 6.7 kilometers away. At that moment, I felt the prosperity and backwardness of a city.
Progress at the cost of life
The struggle between people and sudden death fully embodies the “black swan effect”: people think that they are extremely unlikely to experience it, so they are unwilling to spend time and money to prepare in advance. Only after sudden deaths happen repeatedly, are they willing to invest in this.
In 2016, the deputy editor-in-chief of Tianya Community Jin Bo died suddenly at Hujialou Station on Beijing Metro Line 6, which triggered a large-scale public discussion on the lack of AED equipment for the first time in China.
A related report in “Beijing Business Daily” mentioned that Tian Ying, deputy chief physician of the Heart Center of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, had cooperated with AED manufacturers and proposed to donate a batch of AEDs to the Beijing Subway, but the trip failed. Dr. Tian got it at the timeThe feedback was: “The subway stated that there is no policy, no permit, and no place to release it.” When something similar happened, the first aid experts publicly supported the family to sue the subway company on social media “tacitly”.
Similar incidents frequently occur, driving changes in the company. In June 2018, an employee responsible for security in the Bytedance Administration Department suddenly died at work. The news was briefly discussed on the Internet, but soon, the official “rumor” information of Bytedance was false. But later, a number of BYTE employees who were on the job at the time confirmed that something was true, and added that “a lot of heartaches and fainting occurred”.
In May 2019, 35 American Zall AEDs were installed at the Beijing headquarters of ByteDance. In recent years, many first-tier Internet companies in China have equipped AEDs and first aid kits, such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and Lenovo.
But no company, unit or school is willing to advertise that they have installed AEDs. “To put it bluntly, after a lot of publicity, what if something goes wrong and you can’t save it?” Yang Guang understood the company’s mentality.
This is not a Chinese characteristic. Now that AED is more popular overseas, it is also obtained at the cost of life.
In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that only 20% of the four major high-end hotel chains in the United States were equipped with AEDs. The reason why companies do this is very clear: If the equipment is not saved, there is a legal risk; if there is no equipment, there is no legal responsibility. At this time, it was nearly ten years after Clinton publicly promoted AED.
Now, these multinational groups will install AEDs in hotels in various regions in accordance with the laws and regulations of various countries. However, in mainland China, they are generally not placed in conspicuous places such as lobbies and restaurants, but in security rooms, Monitoring room, etc.
One concern is that China classifies AEDs as three types of medical devices. According to the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Practicing Physicians, only registered physicians who have obtained a physician’s practice certificate are qualified to diagnose and treat patients. In other words, legally speaking, ordinary people do not have the qualifications to use AEDs to save people at will.
What I experienced abroad ten years ago, I will experience it again in China ten years later.
On the morning of December 18, 2020, after a 10-year-old elementary school student of Fengtai School of Renmin University of China died suddenly during running, the surrounding middle and high schools also began to install AED.
Yang Guang has seen similar post-event remedies many times.
On November 27, 2019, Taiwanese artist Gao Yixiang died unexpectedly while recording a variety show in Ningbo. In the morning, the news began to be discussed on a large scale in the media. That day, Yang Guang was participating in a first aid skills competition in Haidian District. When he stepped down, he found that all kinds of information on the mobile phone and the phone were about to explode—all came to buy AEDs.
Every hot event will have a short AED purchase peak, but it will also pass quickly, until the next hot event occurs again, and then be alert. He is the type who seems to be powerful, capable and robust, and expresses his satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the status quo directly.
“There are too many stories like this.” Yang Guang said with some complicated emotions.
First aid is popularized, pushing people to a safe area one step further
After the AED, there is a need for the scene of sudden death. Someone can use it for first aid. Some people are committed to first aid science, so that more ordinary people have the ability to provide help when it is critical.
The East District of Gaobeidian, near the East Fifth Ring of Beijing, has gathered many furniture manufacturing companies, home design companies, and small film and television studios because of cheap rent. The Tonghui River lined up in turn. In these similar little doors, I knocked on the “Emergency Science Group of the Health Communication Committee of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association”.
Three staff members are sitting on the basement floor, and their person in charge, Mr. Jia Dacheng, is interviewed on the first floor.
Jia Dacheng is 72 years old this year. He is a retired doctor at the Beijing Emergency Center. He has been doing first aid science popularization for almost 40 years and he is known as the “First Emergency in China”. Recently, he has been busy setting up a “Life Rescue Alliance” to promote the better development of first aid science and the promotion of AED, and he is thinking about a formal launching ceremony. Speaking with gusto.
In the mid-1980s, Jia Dacheng taught first aid science to others for the first time. The teaching object is a unit such as the second chemical factory. At that time, the teaching aids were very simple, with only a large blackboard, and all kinds of demonstration diagrams had to be drawn by themselves. Jia Dacheng specially bought large and thicker engineered white paper for drawing, and the unit price was “very expensive.”
Jia Dacheng is the first doctor in China to promote AED. In 1996, a medical device manufacturer in the United States sent an AED to the Beijing Emergency Center. At that time, let alone ordinary people, the doctors did not listenSpeaking of AED. Jia Dacheng studied for a while and realized that “this thing is too suitable for ordinary people.” I don’t understand any medical knowledge, and I can learn it in a few minutes of teaching.
He has a strong interest in first aid science and persisted for many years. Friends helped him open Sina Weibo, and the social network became a place for him to start classes anytime, anywhere. When he goes to give lectures in any city, he will announce his whereabouts on Weibo in advance, so that he can also talk to more people about first aid.
Teaching people often gets blinded. Once when I went to a certain unit to give a lecture, Jia Dacheng walked in front, and the two employees behind him talked loudly without hesitation from the organizer and the presenter: “What kind of science, pure money-swindling stuff.” First aid trainers have similar experiences. For example, the pigeons were released during class, the number of people present was pitifully small, and the number was slipped during class… Some said directly: “Why do you ask me to learn this? Are you cursing me?”
Popular Internet platforms have also interfered with the transmission of popular science information. Wang Su has written articles on popular science for several years, and now it is more and more difficult to popularize science.
He tried many methods to make articles read by a wider audience, such as submitting articles to some general-domain media platforms, and writing articles on public accounts mainly for elderly readers, and accompanied by “the kind of Older people will be interested in colorful illustrations”, but the effect is not good. The content of “pseudo-science” on Douyin and Kuaishou spreads much faster, because the audience is more willing to listen to it-after all, no matter how simplified the use of AED is, it is not as popular as “drinking tea against new crowns”. Wang Su was very helpless.
The first aid industry estimates that at present, the popularity rate of first aid among the Chinese public is less than 1%. Even medical staff do not have knowledge of first aid. Chen Jiaji, general manager of Jia Gao Xihe, a private first aid training institution, said that many of the people who come to get the first aid certificate are on-the-job medical workers.
The popularization of first aid science is urgent and requires a little long-term patience. First aid has changed the lifestyle of these people. They hardly smoke, drink very little, and maintain the habit of going to bed early every day. Of course, it also includes having family members “mandatory” receive their own first aid training every year.
What’s more, even if many people have attended first aid courses and taken the certificate, they will not save people by then. In order to enable the trainees to truly master first aid methods, in 2013, Lu Le, the founder of the first response of the National Mutual Aid Platform, specially improved the first aid teaching materials and designed courses based on the stress training method of the United States Military Academy at West Point.
He asked every student to experience it with a dummy. At the beginning of the operation, other teachers “played as passers-by” nearby, some rushed to stop them, some pretended their family members to come up to quarrel, and some blindly commanded nearby—very close to the reality of rescue.Various situations that may be encountered in the Lu Le believes that in a chaotic and stressful environment, if students can calmly control the field and operate, they will be better able to master first aid methods.
In order to allow ordinary people to help others “with confidence” without worrying about legal risks, non-governmental organizations such as First Response, private enterprises such as Mindray Medical, and medical experts have jointly participated in the “China Good Person Act” Promoted by calling on the law to exempt rescuers from liability.
On March 15, 2017, the Fifth Session of the Twelfth National People’s Congress passed the Amendment to the Civil Law, which stipulated in Article 184: “Where the aided person suffers damage due to voluntary emergency relief, The rescuer does not bear civil liability.”
On January 1, 2020, Meng Lingyue, a representative of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, suggested that the use of AED should be included in the compulsory education system. At the same time, it is recommended that police, firefighters, cleaners, and security guards learn about cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the use of AED.
AED promotional video will also be inserted on Beijing buses on some routes. The AED, which experts have been unable to push into the subway before, finally made progress in 2020.
On October 27, 2020, the Beijing Municipal Transportation Commission and the Beijing Municipal Health Commission announced that Beijing has officially launched the AED configuration for rail transit stations, and plans to achieve full coverage of AED equipment by the end of 2022, and first-line station staff will receive training The certification rate exceeds 80%.
Use new technology to fight diseases that accompany technology
Technology is used to quickly make up for the lack of infrastructure in China. First aid is no exception.
People who have experienced cardiac arrest have a greater chance of recurring myocardial infarction within three months. Such patients need to use WCD(wearable automatic defibrillation device). Its technical requirements are higher, and the monthly use cost of imported products is about 30,000 yuan, and there is no domestic substitute.
Zheng Jie is the founder of Suzhou VVS Medical Technology. He has worked in several of the most well-known medical device multinational companies for 20 years. He is one of the first people to introduce AED in China. At that time, AED was mainly used in the emergency or emergency system of public hospitals. For this reason, Zheng Jie “ran all over” public hospitals in first-tier cities, and was deeply impressed by the urgent needs of patients.
“No matter how equipped the hospital is, it will not solve the problem of sudden death outside the hospital.” When Zheng Jie was employed in a foreign company, he also suggested that the headquarters should focus on the Chinese market, but the medical company is relatively traditional, and the Chinese region cannot decide too many things. , In the end there is no following. After many considerations, Zheng Jie decided to start his own business.
One day at the end of April, I met Zheng Jie in the office of VVS Medical Technology in Suzhou Industrial Park. They not only produce AEDs, they are also developing WCDs.
In the R&D area, Zheng Jie proudly displays WCD samples. It looks a bit like a vest, because it needs to closely monitor the user’s ECG signals in real time. The “vest” contains conductive flexible woven electrodes. The slender wire is woven into the soft cloth, and the wire is buried in the inner side, connected to a monitoring device the size of a walkie-talkie, forming a bulge at the waist. When a patient suffers from a cardiac arrest, several capsule-sized power devices will spray conductive glue within a few seconds, defibrillating the patient’s heart within one minute.
After starting a business for a year and a half, Zheng Jie feels that he has done more than the past 10 years combined.
AED belongs to the third category of medical devices and has a series of tests from R&D to market. It takes about a year to develop an engineering prototype, followed by various performance tests for 4 to 6 months. Afterwards, animal experiments and similar thesis defense reports were submitted for review, waiting for acceptance and approval by the Apparatus Examination Center of the State Food and Drug Administration.
If anything goes wrong during the whole process, you have to call back and start over. It’s like climbing to the fifth and a half from the sixth floor with great difficulty, and I have to go back to the first floor and climb again. Now Vives’ AED has finally entered the report review period. If everything goes well, it can be listed in the second half of this year. The WCD will take longer.
Xu Boying, the founder of Suzhou Xinqing Technology Medical Company, focuses on the research and development of artificial hearts. In people who have had a heart attack, heart cells will be damaged. An external artificial heart can provide better help.
The development of the artificial heart has attracted much attention just like the moon landing project, and its invention has gone through generations of progress. The first-generation artificial heart is profiling. In the second generation, people gave up the appearance, restored the mechanical power principle of the heart structure, and used a rotary centrifugal pump to push the liquid. The clinical effect was good, but there were many complications. In the third generation, mechanical bearings were replaced by suspension designs, computer technology could also monitor blood compatibility in real time, and many complications were resolved.
But these technologies need to carry a lot of things with you. Only people who have experienced sudden death and survived by chance need it.
First Response has developed a set of emergency rescue emergency management system, if anyWhen a person faints in the company, the emergency response mechanism can be triggered by scanning the QR code on the wall. The system will notify the emergency responder closest to the accident site to bring the AED within 8 seconds of the code scan. help. At present, Tencent and China Overseas Real Estate have purchased this set of technical solutions.
But once we leave the company’s specific environment and come to the public space, the situation becomes pessimistic again.
Search for “AED” in AutoNavi Map and “Help Map” in WeChat Mini Program, and you can see the nearest AED location. The data is provided by First Response. However, the data comes from the records of volunteers’ field visits. If an AED changes location or expires, the data is difficult to update in time.
Moreover, different AED brands are selected in different locations, and the data is not interoperable between the brands, and the 120 and 999 emergency systems are not connected to each brand. As a result, it is still impossible to use a set of technology to achieve unified management of all AEDs in the city.
The first reaction also tried to cooperate with Fengchao Technology. It was 2017. Lu Le envisioned that through crowdfunding or institutional donations, every express cabinet in the community would have a special grid to store AEDs. . In addition, it plans to introduce 60,000 AEDs into communities in 80 cities within three years, and also provide first aid training for 500 people in each community where Fengchao express cabinets land, and establish a community first aid team. Unfortunately, the funds raised in the end were very small, and the project was difficult to advance.
Zheng Jie believes that in the future, AEDs can be used efficiently in public places, and the equipment should be “mobile”. He has calculated that the coverage area of mobile AEDs will be 6-7 times larger than that of fixed-position AEDs. Put them at JD’s UAV distribution point, where they are needed, AED delivery can be completed within 3~4 minutes; other mobile scenarios and vehicles such as taxis, community safety inspectors and the trunks of online car-hailing , The takeaway brother’s battery car is equipped with it. Zheng Jie believes that with the development of Internet of Things technology, mobile distributed AEDs can ensure that sudden deaths receive first aid within the golden rescue time of 4 minutes.
Just how willing is the company to support takeaway riders, drivers, and couriers to learn first aid and keep such an expensive piece of equipment? In the absence of sufficient business incentives, there has not been a company like Ali transforming its retail business and Didi disrupting the travel market in the field of public first aid.
Sudden death is only the result, but there is no way to change the cause. People can only fight the result.
In the last year, first aidLecturer Yang Guang met more people and took the initiative to buy AEDs and learn first aid in order to protect the people around him.
In 2020, an elderly couple introduced him through a friend, and offered to buy an AED. Their son worked in an unlisted Internet company, and once passed out in the office late at night because of continuous high-intensity overtime work. His office is not equipped with an AED, nor has he organized first aid training.
The couple instructed their son that this AED should be placed in his desk. He can use it, so can his colleagues.
This article is from WeChat official account:LatePost (ID: postlate)< span class="text-remarks">, author: Yao Yinmi, Yang Guang and Chen Huan are aliases in the article