Found on a generic smartwatch listing on Amazon.
Okay, paramedic here, let me break it down:
Heart rate: this is fine, a little low for running, though. The biggest problem here, imo, is the leading zero. It justooks bad.
Blood pressure: this is all fucked up. The higher number is always first, always, just because of how you read blood pressures. See, you place the stethoscope on the brachial artery and inflate the cuff until you stop hearing the bruit (the “thump” noise) of blood coming through the artery and then a little more again. Then, you start deflating and listening for the first bruit. The pressure at which you hear the first bruit is the systolic pressure, the high number, which is your blood pressure while your heart is contracting. Then, you keep going until you hear the last bruit. That last bruit is the diastolic pressure, the low number, and it represents the pressure in your arteries while your heart is relaxed (not squeezing). It’s always written systolic/diastolic, or high/low for the layman. Anyhow, a blood pressure of 36/20 is not something that I would generally consider to be compatible with life. The lower bound for people who are not dying tends to be pretty close to 90-80/something (diastolic is A LOT more loosely goosey than systolic, as a rule. There’s much more short term tolerance for weird diastolic numbers). Also, the leading zeroes again, ugh.
The pulse oximetry- The number of the right is the pulse oximetry. If you have an oximetry of 30%, your sensor is fucked and you need to adjust it. Oximeters are really only considered accurate until about 80-85%, below that and they’re just basically making shit up. Plus, they’re famously inaccurate, and there’s all kinds of stuff that interferes with them functioning properly, so a wildly low oximetry is almost always a malfunction. At any rate, functioning, not obviously dying people don’t typically have oximetries below 90%, though there are certain diseases and edge cases that are exceptions. If this dude did actually have a blood oxygen sat in the 30% range, he’d be in cardiac arrest. And please, please, please nuke the leading zero.
Thank you for your insight! We need more of this on Lemmy!
If you have an oximetry of 30%, you either have a potential zombie outbreak on your hands, or; your sensor is fucked and you need to adjust it.
Fixed that for you 👍
P.S. Thanks, that was a great read.
Man I had a blood oxygen reading of 84-about for a couple of years and every time they’d be like, “oh that can’t be right sweetie, you wouldn’t have walked in here if it was!”
It was right, one corrective surgery later, and I’m 96-98% blood oxygen. Can confirm, 36% is cause for concern.
A doctor seeing 36% O2 sat wouldn’t be concerned, they’d just pass the patient off to the coroner.
Pulse oximeters lie so much that I generally weight their output very lightly in patient assessment. I’ve had old oximeters get readings without even being on a patient before. I’ve picked patients up from clinics where they were losing their shit about the patient’s 54% reading. One sensor adjustment later, the patient was reading 93%; still not amazeballs, but also not full metal panic.
I’ve had old oximeters get readings without even being on a patient before.
It was just picking up the environment’s oxygen concentration! 🤓
Not sure if you’re kidding around here, but it shouldn’t ever pick up atmospheric O2 concentration. The way an oximeter works is that it uses a very specific band of light that interacts differently with heme molecules (or hemoglobin protein, I can’t fully recall) when they’re saturated with something (usually oxygen) vs not saturated with something. That’s what it’s also called an “O2 saturation” or “O2 sat”. You can calculate how much is saturated by how much light is absorbed, and that’s what it does and why it won’t read atmospheric concentration. It’s important to note here that it only reads how much hemoglobin is bound to anything, including both Oxygen and Carbon Monoxide. So, you can asphyxiate from CO poisoning while having an SpO2 of 100%.
