Free Republic

A therapy that increases patients' survival rate to 4.7 percent from 1.5 percent may not sound like a breakthrough, but that is how an editorial in a medical journal last week described a new treatment to revive people whose hearts had suddenly stopped. The new advance was an old drug, vasopressin, injected before a shot of the standard therapy, adrenaline. In people who had no pulse or electrical activity in their hearts, a condition called asystole that is almost always fatal, 12 of 257, or 4.7 percent, who got vasopressin survived, in contrast to only 4 of 262, or 1.5...