Does CPR Work?

Not as well as it does in fiction:

In the movies and on TV, it just takes a few pushes on the chest and, voilà! The victims cough a few times and they’re back to their old selves. Doctors understand that this is rarely the case. When CPR “works,” a more likely scenario is that the person ends up in the hospital receiving even more interventions and suffering from some kind of brain damage, [George Lundberg, editor at large for MedPage Today] says. … Even in the very best case scenarios, only about half of victims survive to be discharged from the hospital — and that’s when CPR is enhanced with advanced technology (AEDs) and highly trained personnel at the ready. Most importantly, those success rates happen only when CPR is given to the victims the technique was intended for — people experiencing sudden cardiac arrest.