The European Cardiology Congress, ESC as it is called, has grown into the largest medical meeting in the world. This year, more than 31,000 attendees from 153 countries came to Barcelona. I was busy. Here is an update of the big stories: Inflammation:Â Experts agree that inflammation associates with heart disease. One of the keys […]
Category: Nutrition
We have to talk about drugs. No, not illicit drugs, but medications used by doctors and patients. Plaintiff attorneys run ads on TV that fool people into thinking certain meds are bad. The current one I deal with is the clot-blocking drug rivaroxaban (Xarelto.) Before that, it was dabigatran (Pradaxa). If, or when, the makers […]
Here is my most recent column on theHeart.org | Medscape Cardiology: Mandrola’s Top 10 Cardiology Stories 2015 What follows below is a short-writing summary of my ten picks. The hyperlinks go to earlier columns I wrote on the topic. 1. The FDA approved two new (injectable) cholesterol drugs. The problem with the PCSK9-inhibitors: the study […]
Social media is awash in news about digital health. I am a skeptic. Health is much simpler. I like this rendering from a kindergarten class. "Kindergarten teacher asked class to create rules for living healthy. Here's what they came up with" via @rickplus3 pic.twitter.com/cRmHfcfjrf — Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) May 9, 2015 When I was a […]
What follows is an introduction to my most recent post on theHeart.org | Medscape Cardiology. It was published yesterday. Many of the comments are excellent. The link is at the end of this post. You might wonder what pool-safety has to do with lifestyle disease. Here is how they relate: I am currently reading an […]
A study published recently in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology will change a way of thinking about the disease atrial fibrillation. And it’s about time. One word describes AF therapy in the past decade: plateau. Ten years have passed and we have no new drugs and no real breakthrough in AF ablation. […]
The election I am going to watch today is in San Francisco. On the ballot there is Proposition E, an initiative to add a 2-cent tax for every once of sugary beverage. Choose Health SF, a group supporting the tax, estimates it would raise $54 million, which would go towards, get this: “funding active recreation […]
I was pleased when the editors of the TheHeart.org reposted my recent essay, Let’s Stop the Unnecessary Treatment of Heart Disease. As of this morning, there are 167 comments. The majority of them were positive, and supportive of lifestyle promotion. Negative comments represented a small minority, but were notable in their vigor, and occasionally reached […]
There are many reasons doctors suffer from burnout and compassion fatigue. One of the least-mentioned of these reasons is that much of what we do is so damn unnecessary. In the US, the land of excess everything, caregivers, especially cardiologists, spend most of our time treating human beings that didn’t need to have disease. Let’s […]
In recent years, progress in the field of cardiology has been painfully incremental. We have enjoyed small gains–a better ablation catheter and mapping system, a couple of new anti-platelet drugs, maybe better stents, and even the highly touted anticoagulant drugs are within 99% in efficacy and safety of warfarin. Major breakthroughs, though, are non-existent. (And […]
It happened while I was leaving a grocery store in the southeastern United States. The young girl who asked me if I wanted to buy Girl Scout cookies was strikingly perfect. She was thin, happy, and well spoken. So were her colleagues. The moms, too, were of healthy weight and cheer. It was as if […]