A Doctor Just Ripped Apart the CPR Scene in ‘Outer Banks' (2024)

This article includes spoilers for Outer Banks Season 2, Episode 3.

The second season of Outer Banks continues the high-octane adventures of treasure-hunting teen surfers the Pogues, with episode three raising the dramatic stakes considerably for lovebirds John B. and Sarah Cameron.

After retrieving the gold from her shady family, Sarah is shot in the hip by her brother Rafe, and John must rush her to a doctor. In a new reaction video, Michael Cellini, an interventional radiologist and YouTuber, gives his professional medical opinion on how accurately the show depicts Sarah's injuries. Spoiler alert: he's not impressed.

"She's doing a great job walking," he remarks, given that the character supposedly has a bullet wound at the top of her right leg. He also observes that the clinic they're in is "not exactly sterile," as John is avoiding going to a real hospital and opening Sarah up to risk of infection.

But the real inaccuracy starts after Sarah's impromptu, highly unsafe surgery, when she is unconscious with a low pulse. According to Cellini, the fictional doctor on the show takes way too long to start CPR. "They're kind of waiting around, not acting, it's kind of odd," he says.

Then, Sarah wakes up and starts talking, despite apparently not having a heartbeat, before losing consciousness again, prompting John to finally start CPR.

"That's some of the worst CPR I've ever seen in my life," he says. "You have to literally push the chest a good 5cm deep, so you have to actually push. For those of you who've done CPR, you understand how hard it is to push against the sternum. You have to put some force into it, like your whole bodyweight."

He also points out that the doctor's advice to try and avoid breaking Sarah's ribs during CPR is false: "At that point, the patient is not alive, you have no choice," he says. "You either give appropriate chest compressions, with appropriate depth and speed, or the patient remains dead. You kind of have to do whatever it takes, and sometimes you break a few ribs in the process, but if it means that their heart returns to normal rhythm? Totally worth it."