Unless You Want to Gamble with Your Life - Better Have a Heart Attack in a Casino - And Not a Hospital!

There are some interesting reasons why this is true in the above link, but as someone who barely survived a recent trip to Downtown's California Hospital emergency room where the attending doctor seemed intent on torturing me to maximize the hospital's profits (and then lying about it afterwards), the last place anyone should get sick at - is at a hospital....

Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 2, 2008

People who suffer a life-threatening alteration in heart rhythms are more likely to survive if they are in a casino or airport than if they are in a hospital, researchers said today.

Doctors already knew that more than half of those who suffer such attacks in airports and casinos survive. But a new study in hospitals shows that only a third of victims there survive -- primarily because patients do not receive life-saving defibrillation within the recommended two minutes.

Nearly 40% of hospitalized patients who received defibrillation within two minutes survived to leave the hospital, compared with 22% of those for whom the response took longer, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.