Imagine my pleasant surprise when I heard the health reporter on Channel 6 News announce last night that a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) says angioplasty is not as efficacious as medication in treating chest pain. Well, quite frankly, that's been known by the patients of the late Howard Wayne for many years.
In 2004, a well-known and respected invasive cardiologist in Indianapolis tried to coerce me into receiving a quintuple coronary artery bypass graft to treat my angina. The whole story is reported in this blog so I won't go over it again. If you are interested, just read this blog from the beginning.
What I do want to discuss is the naivity of the Channel 6 health reporter. She thinks this will decrease the number of angioplasties performed by cardiologists as they opt to use medication in their treatment rather than the invasive procedures they now use. WRONG!
That might be true if the motivation of the physician was to treat the patient in the best way possible. Unfortunately, many of these invsive cardiologists are not motivated by treating you right, they are motivated by money. Angioplasty and bypasses make doctors and hospital piles and piles of money. Writing prescriptions does not.
Bottom line, remember what I've been preaching all these years -- if your doctor wants to cut, get a second opinion from a noninterventionalist cardiologist!
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