Back to this again.
“Resuscitation” is not one thing, it’s a bunch of things, sometimes done together, sometimes not. I assume this refers to the practice of automatic CPR when a hospitalized patient is found dead.
This automatic practice is wrong, and it never should have been allowed to take root in the first place. It was created and is sustained by a vitalist culture that sees the body as a machine, or a collection of electrical and chemical impulses, and it has no respect for transcendence.
Defibrillation is appropriate therapy for a patient with (temporary) cardiac ischemia. It is ALWAYS standard of care within 48 hours of the onset of chest pain, and it has a 95% success rate.
Intubation is ALMOST ALWAYS appropriate therapy for patients with respiratory failure that has treatable cause, and presuming effective treatment of the cause has an 85-95% chance of success.
Defibrillation/intubation of a dead body that has bled to death, or succumbed to metastatic cancer, or whose liver has failed and who is not high on the transplant list, or who has sustained non-survivable motor vehicle trauma, or any of the other innumerable non-survivable events that we deal with every day in the hospital is a macabre, barbaric ritual tha converts caregivers into technicians and converts the passage of the soul out of the body into a violent play that at times becomes medieval.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, resuscitation under the above referenced circumstances (which apply to AT LEAST 90% of hospital “codes” where there is no DNR order) is never successful, at least as measured by 7-day survival.
This is a therapy that should be used like every other one - implemented when it’s appropriate, witheld when it isn’t.
Please read my post 54 and then I would like your opinion if you don’t mind. Btw, are you a doctor? You made many good points here regardless, just curious.