Is Heart Surgery Worth It?
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.
But is that actually the case? Has your life been extended? Is your ailment resolved?
You'd think that with doctors doing about 400,000 bypass surgeries and 1 million
angioplasties a year as part of a heart-surgery industry worth an estimated $100 billion
a year -- the question of whether these operations are worthwhile or overused would
have been addressed and resolved many years ago.
Sadly - not the case - It's taken many years for a few brave physicians to come forth
to tell the truth of this supposedly medical marvel and for that tale of an expensive
medical fraud to be exposed in a major magazine - but at last, Business Week has
done just that in the July 18, 2005 issue.
Of course, we wrote this entire story more than 20 years ago in two widely distributed
published books - Bypassing Bpass in 1984; and more recently Forty Something Forever
(now in its 40th printing with 750,000 copies sold)
As Business Week confirms, quoting serious medical authorities: "Except in a minority
of patients with severe disease, bypass operations don't prolong life or prevent future
heart attacks. Nor does angioplasty, in which narrowed vessels are expanded and then,
typically, propped open with metal tubes called stents.
For the whole story, check out the book that tells it all in a most readable style.
You can read the entire first chapter FREE right here:
http://www.healthsavers.info/HealthyBooks.htm#FortySomethingForever
7:36:05 PM 
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