If you’ve ever taken a CPR class you know that there’s nothing gentle or reassuring about the process. It’s rough handling, but it needs to be in order to actually save a life.

It’s so traumatic, in fact, that some people might opt out in favor of just going gently into that good night.

The discovery that chest compression could circulate blood after a cardiac arrest was first discovered on cats. Though people realized it was possible in 1878, it wasn’t until 1959 that John Hopkins gave it a try on humans.

By the 1970s, CPR classes became available to the public and the method became the default emergency treatment for cardiac arrest.

Stefan Timmermans, a sociologist who has studied the practice, says there’s a reason everyone jumped on board.

“Death, instead of a final and irrevocable passage, becomes a process manipulable by humans. This is the truest of emergencies and you give people the simplest of procedures.”

If it seems too good to be true, he says that’s because it is.

Researchers found that, on television, people who receive CPR survive about 70% of the time. Because of that, people believe that you have about a 75% chance of survival if there’s someone trained who can perform it in the field.

The grim truth is that if you go into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital, your chances of survival are only around 10% (at best).

If you go into cardiac arrest in the hospital, your odds are still only about 17%, and the older you are or the more complicated your health, the worse your odds get.

You might be thinking there’s no harm in trying, if some people will make it, but according to ethicists, there is often literal harm in trying.

“Fractured or cracked ribs are the most common complication, but pulmonary hemorrhage, liver lacerations, and broken sternums can also result.”

One scary potential outcome is called CPR-induced consciousness, in which the compressions circulate enough blood to the brain to make the patient aware during cardiac arrest – which means feeling their ribs popping, breathing tubes being inserted, etc.

In fact, one study found that around half of patients who survive their cardiac arrest due to CPR wish they hadn’t received it at all.

This is understandable once you consider that 60-80% of older CPR survivors state they never return to normal and independent function.

It’s also possible to sustain a brain injury during cardiac arrest, and about 30% of survivors end up with significant neurologic disability.

Medical providers struggle with the CPR losses, too, and can suffer from burnout as a result. Physician and bioethicist Holland Kaplan is sure she knows why.

“The bad experiences far outnumbers the good ones, unfortunately.”

She says that, when it comes to performing it on elderly patients, she wishes she had been “holding his hand in his last dying moments, instead of crushing his sternum. I felt like I was doing harm to him. I felt like he deserved a more dignified death.”

Many doctors, in fact, have chosen to not receive CPR in the event of their own cardiac event.

Doctors realize better than anyone that CPR is meant to be a bridge between life and death, and if someone is ill with a terminal disease, the best thing to do might be to simply let them go.

Basically, it’s a bridge to nowhere if they don’t have the chance to really live again on the other side.

Physicians hope people will seriously educate themselves and then make end-of-life decisions and put them in writing before the unthinkable happens.

If the language “do not resuscitate” is hard to take, consider discussing with your loved ones if and when you’d like doctors to “allow a natural death.”

But whatever words you use, don’t wait too long to have that talk.