Medical

Have you ever gone to the hospitals and seen the heart monitors and question yourself, what does those line mean? How can the doctor tell what type of rhythm your heart gives? How do they know the rate at which your heart is beating? What is all this fancy wording mean when they go in and explain what you have? To the patient it may seem like a foreign language yet to many doctors it becomes a second nature. The process to learning all of this is not easy and as one becomes a student the realization hits that after all it is not as hard as it seems. Everything one doesn’t understand is taught in one class called EKG. One of the most important things to learn is the arrhythmias which are greatly different. The sinus, atrial, junctional, heart, and ventricular rhythms are all important part to learn and understand to fully complete such course. The first categories of arrhythmias which originate in the sinus node are called Normal Sinus Rhythm (NSR), Sinus Bradycardia, Sinus Tachycardia, and Sinus Arrhythmia. Normal Sinus Rhythm is fairly easy to understand due to the pacemaker impulse, which originates in the sinus node and travels through the normal conduction pathways within normal time frames. Because the pacemaker originates in the sinus node and the conduction is normal, the P waves are uniform and will have a P wave for each QRS complex. Due to it being a Normal Sinus Rhythm the heart rate has to be a rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute and the PR interval must fall between 0.12 and 0.20 seconds being consistent across the entire strip. Last but not least the way you can tell if an EKG strip is a Normal Sinus Rhythm is by their QRS measurement that has to be less than 0.12 seconds. A Sinus Bradycardia is similar to a Normal Sinus Rhythm due to each QRS complex having an upright uniform P wave. Having the QRS measurement being less than 0.12 seconds just as a normal QRS is measured. Also having the PRI intervals being in a constant throughout the