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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

I heard somewhere that plain old CPR was very unlikely to help. Still probably better than nothing if someone is there with their heart not beating. Does this go along with your stats?

EDIT: By sheer coincidence I found my stat about CPR while commenting on another thread. http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-die...

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Plain old CPR by itself, with no ambulance on the way, is very unlikely to help. (That was another interesting tidbit - people almost never "wake up" while CPR is being administered).

Ambulance + plain old CPR, however, is much more effective than Ambulance + yelling "ITS GOING TO BE OK!" or playing Angry Birds or whatever. I don't remember the stats on effectiveness of performing CPR while waiting for the ambulance vs. not, but they were persuasive.

This also means that if you are in, say, a wilderness survival situation where help is not coming, CPR will not save a life, but it is still recommended that you perform it-- the emotional impact of just watching somebody die will be dangerous to the survivors.

A 2% chance of recovery is better than a 0.01% chance of recovery anyway.

My parents are GPs. They somewhat recently had an old man have a heartattack in their waiting room, and basically had to give him CPR + rescue breaths (via one of those squeeze bottle ventilators) for about 10 minutes before the ambulance arrived.

The hell of it was, it did work. The guy kept waking up from it while they were doing it, being very grumpy that people were pressing on his chest, and the moment they stopped he'd go unconscious again. Continued through the normal CPR and the ambulance's CPR apparently.

Unfortunately in the end he didn't make it (heart just would not restart fully).

I've been in a situation where we were administering CPR to someone who simply could not have been helped by CPR (although there was no way of us knowing that at the time). We were relieved by first responders in about 3 minutes from calling 911 though.

Plus, as others have said, it's also beneficial for the bystanders to be doing something beneficial. In my own situation, I didn't know for sure that CPR wouldn't have helped until the autopsy came back. That's a pretty big time frame to sit around and wonder if you could have done anything or not. If you're just a random person on the street, you may never get that information to ease your mind.

When I took a CPR class a few years back, we were told that the point of "Samaritan CPR" was really just to keep the person going until a first responder got there, but that the chances of survival past 5 or 10 minutes got increasingly low without actual medical attention.

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