A link from Seth Godin’s ‘Liar Blog’ led me to an interesting post on how Heart Surgery may be a complete sham!

Dr. Nortin Hadler, professor of medicine at UNC knows what he’s talking about. He’s spent the last thirty years examining the stats associated with various medical interventions… and he’s written up some of his results in the Journal of the American Medical Association…

It turns out that bypass surgery (which is incredibly expensive, quite risky and leads half of the patients to suffer depression and a third to have measurable memory loss) does no good at all. None.

In one study, half the angina patients waiting for surgery got nothing but a cut in the chest—no surgery. The other half had the surgery. The results? The placebo group enjoyed the same improvements as those that had the “real” surgery.

Naturally, I googled it to find out more.  Hadler had this to say in an interview published in the Discover magazine:

I think bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives. There are only two reasons you’d ever want to do it: one, to save lives, the other to improve symptoms. But there’s only one subset of the population that’s been proved to derive a meaningful benefit from the surgery, and that’s people with a critical defect of the left main coronary artery who also have angina. If you take 100 60-year-old men with angina, only 3 of them will have that defect, and there’s no way to know without a coronary arteriogram. So you give that test to 100 people to find 3 solid candidates—but that procedure is not without complications. Chances are you’re going to do harm to at least one in that sample of 100. So you have to say, “I’m going to do this procedure with a 1 percent risk of catastrophe to find the 3 percent I know I can help a little.” That’s a very interesting trade-off.

BusinessWeek also wrote a feature on the subject of physicians questioning whether bypasses and angioplasties necessarily prolong patients’ lives:

With doctors doing about 400,000 bypass surgeries and 1 million angioplasties a year — part of a heart-surgery industry worth an estimated $100 billion a year — the question of whether these operations are overused has enormous medical and economic implications. “It is one of the major issues in cardiology right now,” says Dr. David Waters, chief of cardiology at the University of California at San Francisco.
 
It is also part of a far broader problem — what some health-care experts call the medicalization of life. “None of us will live long without headache, backache, heartache, heartburn, diarrhea, constipation, sadness, malaise, or other symptoms of some kind,” argues Hadler. Yet under relentless bombardment by messages from the pharmaceutical and health-care industries, Americans increasingly believe that these symptoms — and many others — are conditions that can and should be cured. “We have an image of ourselves as invincible and powerful and able to overcome all odds,” Hadler says. “And the lay press is too quick to talk about the latest widget and gizmo without asking what it is and does it work.”

The BusinessWeek article offers significant insights into the questions that surround invasive and expensive medical care. It may raise more questions than answer them. But, in the end, aren’t you better off knowing the truth, as shocking as it may be!