Most people come by it honestly. They eat too much, move too little, skimp on sleep, take on too much stress and then succumb to buying larger clothes. The word we use in medicine is insidious. High blood pressure (hypertension – HTN) is one of the leading cardiovascular problems of this time. Some have called […]
Category: General Cardiology
When the editors of Medscape asked me to write a Top Ten article on the best Cardiology stories in 2013, I jumped at the chance. I spent a lot of time thinking about Cardiology this year. I was invested. Plus, 2013 was a year for pivoting–big time pivoting. What made news in 2013 was not […]
Some things are hard to see until one leaves his or her normal surroundings. For American doctors, especially procedure-based doctors, it’s easy to get used to the wastefulness and largesse of delivering care. Then you travel. You go to another healthcare system and are left to gasp. An AF ablation ‘costs’ 100,000 in the US, […]
I’m going to be proud for a moment. Yesterday, the journal JAMA-Internal Medicine published an invited commentary that I co-wrote with Dr. Dan Matlock (@Dan_Matlock) from the University of Colorado. The title of the piece is The Antidote for Unprepared Patients — A Caring Clinician. It’s available for free. Invited editorials in medical journals are often […]
Just a few weeks before the 2013 American Heart Association Sessions, Shelley Wood, the managing news editor of theheart.org emailed to ask if I was up for going to the meeting. With trips to San Francisco, Denver, Athens and Amsterdam already in the books this year, I had counted 2013 as a win. I was […]
Part one of Progress in Cardiology was a sober look at the current lull in innovation. In part 2, as promised, I tell you what is right and optimistic about my field. There is a lot. The post touches on the return of the basics. Basics in doctoring and basics in therapeutics are huge new […]
On the way home from the American College of Cardiology meeting this spring, I wrote a post about the lack of real progress in Cardiology. I got to thinking: Here I was attending major meetings all over the world, and few, if any, studies struck me as game-changers. Everything seemed so painfully incremental. So many […]
A recent study on healthy lifestyle changes got me thinking about why heart disease remains the most deadly human disease. A small study of just a few motivated men with low-risk prostate cancer garnered attention because it contained two important key words: Ornish and Telomeres. Everyone knows Dr. Dean Ornish. And most of us know […]
“Why don’t we die the way we say we want to die? In part because we say we want good deaths but act as if we won’t die at all.†Katy Butler, WSJ There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now in nearly every hospital in this nation. Aggressive life-prolonging care of the elderly too […]
I thought I loved Germany, but this is ridiculous. I love Amsterdam! Yesterday, Michael O’Riordan and I decided to embrace the Dutch mode of transportation. Mike is a real journalist who works for theHeart.org. He’s also a fellow endurance athlete. We got off the congested tram yesterday and decided to rent bikes. This, my friends, […]
Earlier this year a famous group of researchers did a careful study on the relationship between surgical complications and hospital finances. Their findings should jolt you: The average hospital makes money when patients suffer complications from procedures. This is outrageous. It is fee-for-service at its worst. The first thought that popped into my mind after […]