The success rate for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (measured as survival until discharge) is about 10% in the US, much higher than the quoted person’s experience of <1%. (I’m not sure if this figure counts all arrests or only arrests that make it to the ER; since survival is lower for arrests that don’t make it to the, 10% may be an underestimate depending on what’s counted and what’s not).
I was told, when I learned CPR, that accidental causes of heart stoppage, electric shock and drowning for examples, had a good recovery rate with CPR, but that was decades ago and they never presented any evidence I could check.
Learning CPR within the past year, the 10% estimate sounds similar to what i was taught, although we were also taught that the main difference is the length of time until CPR and defibrillation are applied. I can’t find any of those outcome numbers in my classroom texts, so here’s what Wikipedia summarizes: link. One or Two percent is about right, when there’s no bystander nearby to give CPR or (especially) defibrillate. With immediate access to medical treatment survival to discharge can be 20 or 30%. Regardless, it is true that anybody who goes into cardiac arrest is more likely to die than to survive. The citations on Wikipedia point to multiple countries so i don’t know how much any numbers may apply to various regions.
The author of “How Doctors Die” states: “I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one… walked out of the hospital.” That does seem unusually low.
Only if you assume “didn’t walk out of the hospital” means “didn’t survive until discharge”. I assumed he meant that most of those people never fully recovered, left in a wheelchair, or spent the rest of their lives in a nursing home.
The success rate for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (measured as survival until discharge) is about 10% in the US, much higher than the quoted person’s experience of <1%. (I’m not sure if this figure counts all arrests or only arrests that make it to the ER; since survival is lower for arrests that don’t make it to the, 10% may be an underestimate depending on what’s counted and what’s not).
I was told, when I learned CPR, that accidental causes of heart stoppage, electric shock and drowning for examples, had a good recovery rate with CPR, but that was decades ago and they never presented any evidence I could check.
Learning CPR within the past year, the 10% estimate sounds similar to what i was taught, although we were also taught that the main difference is the length of time until CPR and defibrillation are applied. I can’t find any of those outcome numbers in my classroom texts, so here’s what Wikipedia summarizes: link. One or Two percent is about right, when there’s no bystander nearby to give CPR or (especially) defibrillate. With immediate access to medical treatment survival to discharge can be 20 or 30%. Regardless, it is true that anybody who goes into cardiac arrest is more likely to die than to survive. The citations on Wikipedia point to multiple countries so i don’t know how much any numbers may apply to various regions.
The author of “How Doctors Die” states: “I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one… walked out of the hospital.” That does seem unusually low.
Only if you assume “didn’t walk out of the hospital” means “didn’t survive until discharge”. I assumed he meant that most of those people never fully recovered, left in a wheelchair, or spent the rest of their lives in a nursing home.
That is how I read it too but it is unnecessarily vague. Also, many conditions of being weak or in a wheelchair is preferable to death in my opinion.