Rapid Interpretation of EKG's

I just finished Rapid Interpretation of EKG's by Dale Dubin.

Well before I discuss the book - yes, the author is a pedophile. If you click on the link I put for his name you'll see that he is a funny guy, but also into child porn. Anyway, the book is still very good, but don't be surprised if when people see the book they point at it and say child molester.

Anyway, if you don't plan on reading EKGs (or designing a device that reads them) then there are probably not many reasons to read the book. It does provide some interesting information about how the heart works, but almost entirely focused around how that relates to reading an EKG so there are probably better books for just learning about the heart. For the med school types that read this blog I would recommend that you check out the book - it may be too far below your level, but if at some point you do need to read EKGs it does a really good job of showing you what to look for. Normally I wouldn't be pretentious enough to recommend a book on EKGs to bio majors (well ok, maybe you know me too well to believe that), but all the clinical guys at work talk about how good the book is. Every page has a diagram that takes up half the page and then the other half is text talking about the diagram and sometimes he puts in blanks that you are supposed to be able to fill in (the word is just off to the right in case you can't).

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and the rest of this blog post should be completely ignored.

I found a few items in the book particularly interesting.

Maybe I'm just silly, but whenever I saw EKG machines on TV or in movies (why is something on TV but in a movie?) I basically viewed it as a large heart rate monitor. Of course after reading a book on how to interpret EKGs I realize that is incredibly wrong and that you can actually find out quite a bit about a person's heart and if there are any issues from looking at an EKG.

I had no idea that while your heart has a primary timer (the SA node) that sets your heart rate there are actually many backups that can take over for a variety of reasons. The really interesting thing is that it is a system of lots of small parts that follow somewhat simple rules and interact with each other. The simplicity allows it to gracefully handle many situations; however, as a decent sized system there are plenty of ways to throw it off and have the interactions become harmful. This strikes me because it is very similar to what is often seen in engineering, particularly when looking at larger system design (especially in software where the systems can be very large and often have a similar lots of little pieces design).

Much like a large system problems can occur due to a variety of reasons, but as you degrade sections of the system you are more likely to see interaction problems. In particular a person can go into cardiac arrest for a variety of reasons, but the probability and number of ways it can occur is increased when the heart is unhealthy (in particular myocardial infarction, aka clogged arteries).

And of course I have to like a book that says, "The ICD is a technological masterpiece!". (An ICD is an implantable cardioverter defibrillator - and if you don't know what that is then somehow you have been spared from my incessant discussions about what I do at work).