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Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...

Am I right that shocking the heart with the paddles is used mainly to jolt
the heart into a proper rhythm if it is fibrillating (quivering randomly),
rather than to restart an asystolic (totally stopped) heart? Or can it do
both? In view of the amount of adrenaline I was apparently given (my wife
described a gradually-growing pile of empty ampoules on the bedroom floor)
and the recent announcement about the increased risk of brain damage, I was
lucky... Maybe "no pulse" (as she was told by the paramedics) doesn't
necessarily mean total flat-line, and that there's still *some* activity,
even if it's not very coordinated.

I don't know about always, but many years ago I took a course on
repairing hart monitoring equipment and one of the things talked about
was the heart will quit beating in rhythem, but sort of viberate and
work against its slef and quit pumping. The defib machine will shock it
back into rhythem.