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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 3:56 - length declared by PlayhousePals.

Mad props to the guy who stripped down to give skin to skin contact. That is a life saving tactic in so many situations it isn't even funny. You do have to discard many social norms in addition to your clothes to pull it off though.

Also, never stand on ice when trying to save another who's fallen in: You should LAY DOWN on the ice.

Why did they keep trying to swim back towards / climb back on the ice, when the shoreline is right there....?

Applying external heat to a hypothermic person is a great way to put their body into shock. Dry them off, cover them and insulate them. The worst thing you can do is try to heat them up too quickly.

When the body becomes hypothermic all the blood rushes away from the extremities and to the centre of the body, protecting the major organs, particularly the brain heart and lungs. Warming the person using external heat makes the blood rush to the area which is being heated and away from the brain heart and lungs.

I work as a rescue person at a sailing lake in the UK and we have to deal with a lot of hypothermic people in the middle of winter. All they want to do is go and get in a warm shower, and when they do you end up with heads split open from when they pass out from the shock.

A properly wrapped up person will warm up (as long as they aren't too far gone, which the person in the video clearly wasn't). It won't be what they want to do, and it's not what feels the most comfortable to them, but it is the safest option for them.

we used to be advised to put the hypothermic person in a sleeping bag with another person. This changed when it was found that more often than not this ended up with two hypothermic people, as the cold person chilled the well person faster than they could support.

It was a very brave thing for the guy to do, stripping off in those conditions isn't comfortable or easy, and he did it for a great reason. It just wasn't necessarily the right thing to do.

*eia

Adding video to channels (Eia) - requested by ant.

So, which is it? Did the skin to skin contact heat up the at risk individual too quickly or was it not effective, rather chilling the assistant? I don't see how it can be both ways.

Basically not enough of each. The cold person is warmed, but not enough and not in a safe way, and the warm person is chilled, sometimes enough to become hypothermic themselves.

There will be plenty of situations where it does work, but that's the case with lots of potentially dangerous solutions. Sometimes the person will be on the edge of hypothermia, but not too far gone and a nice warm cup of hot chocolate will warm them up enough for them to recover. That isn't the same as saying that a warm cup of hot chocolate is the best way to fix hypothermia. It's almost certainly what the cold person will want, and it's a very obvious answer. For a lot of cases it will be fine, but in a few situations it will be very dangerous.

That's what this is all about, and why it can be counter intuitive. In most mild cases skin to skin contact or a warm drink will help, but in more severe cases either of these things could be deadly. However, in the mild cases it won't hurt to assume the person is worse than they are and warm them slowly. Unless you're absolutely sure how bad the hypothermia is its much safer to assume the worst.

People aren't very good at assessing things in an emergency situation. This is one of the reasons the CPR training has changed in recent years. They used to spend a long time teaching us how to find a pulse and how to check breathing, but the time spent rafting around with that in an emergency could kill someone. So now you just assume the person isn't breathing and their heart isn't beating and go for it. Giving CPR to someone who doesn't need it is less likely to kill them than delaying CPR with someone who does.