Chance of REVIVING someone with CPR is very small but the point of doing it is not to revive them, it is to keep oxygenated blood moving to the brain and body until the victim can be revived by the first aid crew. The odds of this working is much higher within the times listed earlier. Their heart needs to be restarted and this won't happen by pushing or pounding on it.
Out here in Washington state more and more emergency crews are carrying the portable defib machines which restart the heart.
Of course 2 miles offshore the response time for a rescue is not so good. It will help if you are carrying a marine radio or cell phone.
: In the CPR course that Linda and I recently took, we were taught that if the
: victim had an obstructed airway that couldn't be cleared via a head tilt,
: jaw thrust or removal of an obstructing object, you administer CPR and
: hope that the force on the chest clears the airway. At that point, the
: person is a goner, so if your efforts help at all, it's a plus. Whether
: their heart is beating is irrelevent,since as they put it "100% of
: people who cannot breathe, die".
: We were also told that the chances of reviving someone who's had a heart
: attack or stroke were infinitesimally small; it ain't like on TV. However,
: CPR works well for people who have been hit by lightning, have inhaled
: poisons or have drowned. Considering that the first and last instances are
: possibilities on the water (the latter much more likely than the former),
: I would say that. yes, it's worth learning CPR. If you're in a situation
: where you cannot use it due to not enough people or arriving too late,
: that's a shame, but unavoidable. On the other hand, if you had the
: opportunity and manpower to save a life and no one in the group knew how,
: that would be a real tragedy!
