ABSTRACT
If the patient is fully resuscitated there is no difficulty in knowing when to curtail one’s efforts. If, however, the procedure is clearly likely to be unsuccessful, someone has to take the decision to end the activity. This should be done with the senior doctor present who by then should know the full history of the patient and the problems which have occurred. The younger the patient, the longer one should continue resuscitation. It is possible to resuscitate people after an hour and half’s cardiac arrest procedure provided that the underlying heart is not severely damaged in the first place. In the elderly patient half an hour of cardiac massage would certainly be long enough to indicate whether the heart will genuinely restart.
