Luckily, I managed to miss most of the disco era. Sure, I was alive, but I hadn’t reached my teens so I watched the whole mess from afar.

The closest I got to disco fever was a copy of the strange “Disco Duck” album released by DJ Rick Dees, who was making fun of the whole fad. I didn’t realize I was supporting satire at that point. I just thought the duck voice was funny.

Like a lot of people my age, I have supported disco through the years, but with a wink and a nod. I continually find myself amazed as the Village People song “YMCA” gets families to dance and sing since that’s the last thing the lyrics suggest.

But songs like that ultimately make us have fun, and that’s the point. Having fun and saving lives.

Yes, disco saves lives. Just ask the doctors from the University of Illinois.

Research at the university shows that doctors and students can maintain the ideal number of chest compressions during CPR if they listen to the Bee Gee’s hit “Stayin’ Alive” while resuscitating a patient.

Apparently, the most effective CPR requires 100 beats per minute. The song features 103 beats per minute. The research did not indicate how the falsetto voice of the brothers Gibb may have influenced the findings.

The researchers also said the ability for the song to get stuck in your head played a huge role because they also tested the number of compressions people could do while just thinking about the song. This also worked, although most people did more than 100 compressions, probably because they wanted to get the song out of their head.

What I want to know is why did they choose disco? Sure, the song has a steady rhythm, but it’s not that fast. Punk rock broke out in response to disco and many of those songs have a fast and steady drum beat. Why not something from The Ramones?

Besides, the researchers have really credited the wrong song for this medical miracle. When I read about this, the music geek in me stopped caring about how doctors saved people’s lives and wanted to find out more about the song. So I went to the one and only source – Wikipedia.

The father of the drummer for the Bee Gees died when the band was in the studio recording the song and had to leave. They couldn’t find a good replacement so they ended up stealing a snippet of drums from another song and repeating them over and over (and over and over) throughout “Stayin’ Alive.”

So, in reality, “Night Fever” really saves lived because they might not have had that incessant beat if they hadn’t stolen the drums from there.

I guess saying a song with the world “fever” in it saves lives wouldn’t sounds as interesting as “Stayin’ Alive” helping people with CPR. I bet the researcher knew all this and hid the truth just to get better headlines.

I hope he tries to see if other songs work just as well because I need to think of another song to get the Bee Gees out of my head.