IT HAS HAPPENED IN MAYBE A MILLION TELEVISION shows: the monitor above a critically ill patient's bed goes beep, beep, beep . . . beeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Doctors and nurses rush to the bedside. The patient's heart has stopped, and the medical professionals go into a frenzy trying to start it up again.
What TV rarely acknowledges is the aftermath. Few of the patients revived ever get well enough to leave the hospital -- and a study from Duke University Medical Center shows how few. Doctors monitored 146 very sick people given cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) over a three-year period. Only 58% could be...
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