CPR Intervention A 2000 study found that when CPR was used in conjunction with automated external defibrillators by trained personnel in a casino, survival rates jumped. Fifty-three percent of those patients lived to walk out of the hospital. Speed, it found, was critical. If intervention happened within three minutes, 74 percent survived. If you’re not trained in CPR, another study found that chest-compression-only CPR could be even better than CPR using mouth-to-mouth breathing. CPR is only useful when the heart stops because of a temporary problem that can be reversed or treated, not from trauma like a car accident, David Newman, director of clinical research in the department of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, told the Washington Post. “Cardiac arrest from traumatic injuries is not a survivable condition. Even when we say it ‘works,’ what that means is that the heart is back and instead of dying then, they die later in ICU with many tubes and wires.” CPR, he says, was never meant to be used in the case of long-term, chronic conditions. “We’ve gotten confused about where CPR is good – almost a miracle maker – and where CPR is a use of resources that would be unwanted by the patient and unduly invasive and burdensome to both provider and patient,” Newman told the Post. “It should be done when there’s a substantial chance of full recovery and the patient can safely be presumed to have wanted it.” Source link: http://news.msn.com/science-technology/cpr-not-as-effective-as-television-po rtrays Submitted by: Bill Jones, BATRC Media