If you haven’t had a heart attack, but your cardiologist wants to perform an angioplasty, you might want to ask some serious questions from your doctor and get a second opinion.
The latest study of 600,000 angioplasty procedures (costing about $20,000) show that at least one in eight were inappropriate in cases where heart attacks did not occour.
“About 600,000 angioplasty procedures, which almost always involve placement of a tiny metal tube called a stent, are done in the U.S. each year. Roughly 70% of these procedures are performed on patients suffering symptoms of a heart attack and aren’t medically controversial. But the remainder are done on stable patients who are suffering mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. Of those, 50% are deemed appropriate, 38% uncertain and 12% inappropriate, the report says,” according to a Wall Street Journal story today by Ron Winslow and John Carreyrou.
“One in eight is probably higher than we would like,” said Ron Winslow and John Carreyrou., and the study’s lead author, said the WSJ.
“The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Tuesday, come amid rising concern about the overuse of big ticket medical technology. Such concerns are rising not only in cardiology, but in other major specialties as state and federal governments and health insurers seek to contain health-care costs.”
For at least four years there have been serious questions as to whether stents were any better than medicine used to treat patients suffering from chronic by stable chest pain.
Just get those stents in before patients recognise that they are simply cash cows.
it seem like the next new “cash cow” is stress tests…I ‘ve been hearing about friends who get stress tests when the MD’s don’t have an answer of “what is wrong”…they needs a cardiologist present…sitting a watching ………..