How to save a life

[TheSportsPredictor]

St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Derrick Goold performed CPR on Cubs' videographer Mike Flanary after Flanary collapsed in the dugout yesterday.

Flanary lived to hopefully tell the tale.

Post-Dispatch's Goold helps save man's life at Busch Stadium

 

[Azrael]

A great reminder that everyone should learn CPR.

Takes half an afternoon at the Y or your local Red Cross.

 

[ChrisLong]

Wow. Angels former pitcher and broadcaster Mark Langston returned to Angel Stadium yesterday with copies of his EKG, showing he was dead for 3-1/2 minutes after he collapsed at Houston. It's being called a miracle, him being in the press box broadcasting booth, people around, two paramedics eating across the hall who immediately came to his aid. If he had been by himself, he was a goner. He said he vividly remember reading the lineups, then seeing the leadoff batter knock the donut off his bat .... then nothing.

 

[justgladtobehere]

Are Doctors More Likely to Refuse CPR?

Are doctors more likely to refuse revival in the event of cardiac arrest? In the Hopkins study, 90 percent of doctors said they'd rather die by cardiac arrest than be resuscitated. Only a quarter of the public feels the same way.

Do doctors know something we don't about the miracles of CPR? In one Japanese study of 95,000 CPR cases, just eight percent of patients survived for longer than a month after being revived.

There's no question that CPR helps save lives; but whether revival is always the right choice is a different matter:

Well-meaning CPR advocates talk in terms of "survival," but all the term means is that the heart again beats on its own. In the above example, survival was 11 percent, but "survival" as often understood by the public -- regaining a reasonable quality of life -- was zero.
The entire essay is definitely worth a read.

From the link:

I also asserted in “How Doctors Die” that CPR is rarely as effective as people seem to think. What people have seen on television is at odds with happens in real life. A 1996 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that CPR as portrayed on television was successful in 75 percent of 60 cases and that 65 percent of the patients went home. In contrast, in a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR in Japan, health professor Hideo Yasunaga and fellow researchers found that only 8 percent of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3 percent could lead a mostly normal life. A little more than 3 percent were in a vegetative state, and about 2 percent were alive but had a “poor” outcome.

[Edit]
The response to the first question is misleading.
From the original essay:

When asked whether they would want cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, if they were in a chronic coma, about 90 percent of the Johns Hopkins doctors said no. Only about 25 percent of the public gives the same answer.