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longer follow-up study found nearly identical results, 17 and in the meantime, Ewy had found a bigger stage to test the theory.
He had also found an important ally, Dr. Bentley Bobrow. Bobrow is a serious, small, almost dainty man in his mid-thirties.
As director of emergency services for the state of Arizona, he oversees the training of paramedics, and by 2005, he was familiar
with Ewy’s research, not to mention the real-life experiments in Tucson and southern Wisconsin. Bobrow decided it was time
to try the experiment on a larger scale.
Unlike Gordon Ewy, Bobrow tends to worry out loud—especially about whether a reporter will paint him as a rebel. While Ewy
has been described as “a constant thorn in the side of the AHA,” Bobrow likes to emphasize what he shares with mainstream
thinking. “I don’t want to tell anyone else what to do,” he says. Still, despite the diplomatic language, the crew cut, the
neat white dress shirt and tie, an independent streak sticks out, and not just in medicine. Along with his wife and young
son, for example, Bobrow doesn’t own a television set. 18 And he doesn’t mince words.
“Some people felt it was negligent to not follow the existing guidelines, but if with the guidelines 97 percent of everyone
died, we felt it was incumbent on us to try something new” is how Bobrow explains the urgency. But “something new” was a hard
sell. In most Arizona cities, emergency response is handled by the fire department. As Bobrow drove from firehouse to firehouse,
he got an earful from medics and firefighters who had been doing things the same way for more than two decades. There were
paramedics on the job who had been part of Glendale’s first-ever CPR class back in the 1970s, when CPR was new and almost
miraculous in its promise. The paramedics thought of themselves as medical professionals, and now they weren’t supposed to
give breaths?
Anyone
could do this? 19
Patiently, stop after stop, again and again, Bobrow made the pitch. He kept coming back to the same point: What was there
to lose? When 97 percent of the patients died, how could they do worse?
In fact, Bobrow and Ewy were confident they would do much better. They’d both heard too many stories to be convinced otherwise.
Ewy’s favorite one dates back to the mid-1990s when an emergency physician from Seattle played a tape recording for him. It
was of a phone call from a woman who called 911 after her husband collapsed and stopped breathing. While an ambulance raced
toward the house, the 911 dispatcher tried to guide the woman through basic CPR. The advice would sound familiar to anyone
who has taken a CPR class in the past thirty years: Feel for a pulse. Tilt the head back. Check the airway. Listen for breathing.
Pinch the nose. Breath into the mouth twice. Fifteen chest compressions. Repeat.
Frightening as the scene must have been, Ewy can’t stop grinning when he tells the story. The frantic woman would ask how
far away the ambulance was, and the dispatcher would send her back to continue CPR. “After a while,” says Ewy, “she came back
to the phone and said, ‘Why is it, every time I press on his chest, he opens his eyes, and every time I stop and breathe for
him, he goes back to sleep?’ ” He paused and gave a rueful laugh. “This woman in ten minutes learned more about cerebral perfusion
[getting blood flow to the brain] than we had in fifteen or twenty years of CPR research.” All that research, Ewy says, points
to one thing: “You don’t stop pressing on the chest for anything.”
By March 2007, Bobrow’s firefighters were ready to pull up the curtain on their experiment. The results were better than anyone,
except perhaps Ewy, had dreamed. Among all victims of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the survival rate more than tripled.
Among those whose heart stopped in front of a witness who called 911, it nearly quadrupled. Bobrow set the bar high: he
He had also found an important ally, Dr. Bentley Bobrow. Bobrow is a serious, small, almost dainty man in his mid-thirties.
As director of emergency services for the state of Arizona, he oversees the training of paramedics, and by 2005, he was familiar
with Ewy’s research, not to mention the real-life experiments in Tucson and southern Wisconsin. Bobrow decided it was time
to try the experiment on a larger scale.
Unlike Gordon Ewy, Bobrow tends to worry out loud—especially about whether a reporter will paint him as a rebel. While Ewy
has been described as “a constant thorn in the side of the AHA,” Bobrow likes to emphasize what he shares with mainstream
thinking. “I don’t want to tell anyone else what to do,” he says. Still, despite the diplomatic language, the crew cut, the
neat white dress shirt and tie, an independent streak sticks out, and not just in medicine. Along with his wife and young
son, for example, Bobrow doesn’t own a television set. 18 And he doesn’t mince words.
“Some people felt it was negligent to not follow the existing guidelines, but if with the guidelines 97 percent of everyone
died, we felt it was incumbent on us to try something new” is how Bobrow explains the urgency. But “something new” was a hard
sell. In most Arizona cities, emergency response is handled by the fire department. As Bobrow drove from firehouse to firehouse,
he got an earful from medics and firefighters who had been doing things the same way for more than two decades. There were
paramedics on the job who had been part of Glendale’s first-ever CPR class back in the 1970s, when CPR was new and almost
miraculous in its promise. The paramedics thought of themselves as medical professionals, and now they weren’t supposed to
give breaths?
Anyone
could do this? 19
Patiently, stop after stop, again and again, Bobrow made the pitch. He kept coming back to the same point: What was there
to lose? When 97 percent of the patients died, how could they do worse?
In fact, Bobrow and Ewy were confident they would do much better. They’d both heard too many stories to be convinced otherwise.
Ewy’s favorite one dates back to the mid-1990s when an emergency physician from Seattle played a tape recording for him. It
was of a phone call from a woman who called 911 after her husband collapsed and stopped breathing. While an ambulance raced
toward the house, the 911 dispatcher tried to guide the woman through basic CPR. The advice would sound familiar to anyone
who has taken a CPR class in the past thirty years: Feel for a pulse. Tilt the head back. Check the airway. Listen for breathing.
Pinch the nose. Breath into the mouth twice. Fifteen chest compressions. Repeat.
Frightening as the scene must have been, Ewy can’t stop grinning when he tells the story. The frantic woman would ask how
far away the ambulance was, and the dispatcher would send her back to continue CPR. “After a while,” says Ewy, “she came back
to the phone and said, ‘Why is it, every time I press on his chest, he opens his eyes, and every time I stop and breathe for
him, he goes back to sleep?’ ” He paused and gave a rueful laugh. “This woman in ten minutes learned more about cerebral perfusion
[getting blood flow to the brain] than we had in fifteen or twenty years of CPR research.” All that research, Ewy says, points
to one thing: “You don’t stop pressing on the chest for anything.”
By March 2007, Bobrow’s firefighters were ready to pull up the curtain on their experiment. The results were better than anyone,
except perhaps Ewy, had dreamed. Among all victims of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the survival rate more than tripled.
Among those whose heart stopped in front of a witness who called 911, it nearly quadrupled. Bobrow set the bar high: he
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