Wow, this is a heck of a thread.
It was touched on in a couple of posts, but have we considered that the entire issue is ALMOST moot?
I can quote NH statistics from a few years ago (from my 8 year stint on a municipal EMS service): only approx. 10% of pre-hospital cardiac arrests are resuscitated and only 10% of those (an aggregate 1%) ever leave the hospital again. My service was an ACLS provider only 10 minutes from our receiving hospitals. We had the best rate in the state one year, 12%. 99% of these were secondary to cardiac disease. The trauma-arrest resuscitation rate is close to zero.
An interesting book was written on all this, "Sudden Death and the Myth of CPR" by Stefan Timmermans.
Cardiac arrest secondary to respiratory arrest caused by simple mechanical means, say because of drowning, has better statistics, but I don't know what they are.
It seems likely that the difference between the worst CPR and the best CPR is probably worth fractions of a percentage point in survivability. Let's face it, cardiac arrest is almost always a very late sign of a really damaged system.
Anyway, I say "almost moot" because, like anyone else, if and when it's time I want my 1% chance. But please don't argue too much while you're doing it, just give it your best try. At worst you'll have provided what now amounts to the first important part of the modern-day American death ritual.
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