Video from China shows wrong treatment of both heart attack and seizure

"A person had a sudden heart attack at a Singapore theatre. Doctors and assistants in Singapore patted the patient's inner elbows, and he woke up in about two minutes!" reads this July 25, 2022 post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.

The video -- viewed more than 30,000 times -- appears to show two people hitting the inner sides of a man's elbows as he sits unconscious in a cinema before he eventually wakes up.

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Screenshot of the Weibo post, taken on April 25, 2023

The video was shared alongside a similar false claim in Chinese on Facebook and Douyin, China's version of TikTok. It was also shared in similar German-language posts on Facebook and Telegram which AFP debunked here.

Some posts claimed the incident happened in a theatre in Singapore. However, the voices heard in the video do not match Singaporean accents.

AFP found a Chinese report from August 2017 which included footage from the video (archived link).

It said that a young man suffered a seizure at a cinema in Nanning, a city in China's southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Photos from the cinema match scenes from the video (archived link).

'Dangerous information'

In response to the false posts, Christiane Tiefenbacher, chief physician of the clinic for cardiology and vascular medicine at the Marien-Hospital Wesel in Germany, told AFP on March 21, 2023 that it would be "dangerous" to use the method shown in the video (archived links here and here).

"The video and the associated instructions for first aid in the event of a suspected heart attack are life-threatening and lack any scientific evidence," she said. "It is dangerous to waste time when an acute heart attack is suspected by using the elbow-clapping technique shown in the video."

Some posts attempt to justify the method by saying it would activate acupuncture points on the elbow, and supposedly improve blood circulation (archived link).

Tiefenbacher, who also sits on the board of the German Heart Foundation, wrote in an email: "This information is wrong. Information of this kind is scandalous from a medical point of view because it deters sufferers and helpers in the emergency event of a heart attack from the only correct first aid measure, which is to call the emergency services. It thereby endangers the life of the heart attack patient."

The posts go on to claim that the elbow-clapping method could prevent heart disease, which Tiefenbacher also said was "wrong".

She said: “There is no medically proven evidence that this elbow-clapping technique can be used to trigger increased blood flow to the heart or even a dissolution of the clot (thrombus) in the heart, apart from locally increased blood flow to the arm.

"On the contrary: information of this kind is even dangerous."

The Hong Kong Brain Foundation confirmed in an email to AFP on April 26 that there was no scientific basis for the purported method of treating seizures shown in the video.

"Hitting the elbow won’t cure a seizure," said a spokesperson for the foundation.

Heart attack response

During a heart attack, the heart is deprived of sufficient oxygen supply when vessels are blocked, resulting in it lacking the strength to supply the body (archived link).

In a worst-case scenario, it can lead to immediate cardiac arrest. Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of death worldwide (archived link).

It is important for heart attack patients to get to a hospital as quickly as possible. There, the vessels can be opened again using cardiac catheter technology. A defibrillator can be used to react to complications such as ventricular fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat.

Health authorities around the world, including the German Red Cross, German Heart Foundation, and the US CDC, recommend immediately alerting emergency services if a heart attack is suspected (archived links here, here and here).

According to the German Heart Foundation, if the person is conscious, they should be positioned with their upper body elevated, tight clothing removed, and the victim's circulation monitored. If the patient is unconscious during a cardiac arrest, resuscitation must be started immediately (archived link). They do not recommend hitting the inside of the arm.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been practiced for more than 2000 years and is still popular today, used in China for example in Covid-19 treatment (archived link).

After years of lobbying, the World Health Organization (WHO) included TCM in its official disease and treatment catalog in 2019. European scientists criticised this decision because TCM is not based on evidence (archived link).