On TV, CPR looks like a miracle: a few light pushes on the chest, a couple of assisted breaths, and the person sputters back to life.

“CPR has been represented in the media and TV shows and all of these other places as a relatively innocuous intervention with high rates of success from which people recover with little problem,” professor Jason Adam Wasserman said on this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast.” In fact, it can be physically damaging — broken ribs, punctured lungs — and painful. And for patients who are already medically frail, it often fails.

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