Chest compressions

I became certified in Basic Life Support by the American Heart Association because it was a required part of medical school orientation. This will technically allow me to perform rescue breathing, chest compressions, operate an AED to save men, women, children, and infants.

We, all entering first-year medical students, learned this by reading materials and practicing on dummy adults and infants that looked like this.

http://www.enasco.com/product/SB14905U

 

These dummies have several differences from actual humans that I believe are significant.

The most obvious is that they don't feel like real humans. Humans chest don't make a clicking noise when you have compressed the chest sufficiently, like these dummies do to teach you how much force to use. But that's an inherent limitation to using any simulated human for medical training.

But what most bothered me was that there were no adult female dummies. Our education is being compromised because we don't know what to do with breast! We are taught to put our hands on the sternum between the nipples. This means that our fingers are resting over the chest. On the model this is easy but on a female patient, the rescuer would be touching the patient's breast. Frankly, we need to practice the situations that are similar to what we encounter in real emergency because even physicians-in-training need some time and experience to be comfortable with touching other people's bodies.

In adition to limiting our education, these models are another example of the male gender as neutral. The adult male torso as supposed to represent all adult patients. We traditionally regard the female breasts as sexually provocative. Perhaps the logic goes like this: CPR is serious, life-saving business, the CPR instructions and dummies don't want to inject sex into the discussion. But this is failing to completely educate and perpetuating the belief that men represent everyone.


Here are some more examples of the male gender as neutral, from my favorite blog Sociological Images