Is Heart Surgery Worth It?

Is Heart Surgery Worth It?

"Is Heart Surgery Worth It?
By John Carey, Businessweek, July 18, 2005

Physicians are looking at troubling studies and questioning whether bypasses and angioplasties necessarily prolong patients' lives

You start breathing hard after climbing stairs, and your chest hurts. You go to your doctor. Scans reveal that arteries feeding your heart are severely narrowed. Your doctor sends you to the hospital for coronary bypass surgery or angioplasty to restore the blood flow to your heart. Despite the trauma of surgery, you're glad the blockage was caught in time, saving you from a potentially fatal heart attack.

There's just one problem with this happy tale of modern medicine: More and more doctors are questioning whether such heart procedures are actually extending patients' lives. One of them, Dr. Nortin M. Hadler, professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Last Well Person, is urging the U.S. medical establishment to rethink its most basic precepts of cardiovascular care. Bypass surgery in particular, he says, 'should have been relegated to the archives 15 years ago.' "

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