CPR..... Hollywood VS Reality

Many times we look at movies and view them to be exactly like real life. In class, my teacher Aaron demonstrated the dangers of performing CPR wrong. The first danger we were introduced to was potentially breaking the person's ribs. CPR is also only to be used on people whose hearts have stopped. If you do CPR on a person with a beating heart, you could stop their heart. You could kill someone by practicing CPR on them.

This presents an obvious issue when filming a scene where someone's heart stops. The chest pumps are a safety hazard. Often, they will cut the person's body or head out of frame so that it's not a living human going through it.

The other option is to perform the CPR wrong, by bending their arms as they pump. There's a danger in that too, as people learn from movies how to do CPR. Then, when someone's heart actually stops, they won't know how to do CPR correctly.

In movies, they always have that last chest hit and the person magically gasps and gets up off the floor with ease. Well, in real life that person would probably have broken ribs and punctured lungs