HEART SURGERY INDUSTRY - $50 BILLION / YEAR

The heart surgery industry is booming. According to the American Heart Association statistics, in 1995 doctors performed 1,460,000 angiograms (the diagnostic procedure that starts the ball rolling) at an average cost of $10,880 per procedure. 

This resulted in 573,000 bypass surgeries at $44,820 a shot, and 419,000 angioplasties (the balloon procedure for opening up arteries) at $20,370 each. The total bill for these procedures is over $50 billion a year.

Roughly one in 25 patients having bypass and about one in 65 undergoing angioplasty dies from the procedure. (close to 30,000 lives).

Several studies over the past two decades, involving over 6,000 patients with heart disease, have shown that patients funneled into surgical procedures do significantly worse than those treated with non-invasive techniques.

For example, a carefully designed study of bypass surgery, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study (CASS), was published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1983. A total of 780 patients, all of whom had significant heart disease and chest pain for six months, were divided into two groups: those who would be treated by surgery and those who would be treated by medication.

Patients having surgery fared no better than those on medical therapy. In fact, after ten years, the majority of the surgical patients were worse than those who avoided surgery!

The most recent study on the subject was published in the June 18, 1998 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and involved almost 1,000 patients across the country who had experienced the most common type of heart attack. 

Half the patients were randomly selected for invasive surgery, which included angioplasty or bypass surgery. The other half were assigned to conservative management with non-invasive testing and medication. the result of this study was the same: patients who 
underwent surgery did worse. The in-hospital death for heart attack rates were 214% higherin the surgical group.

Eugene Braunwald, M.D., chief of cardiology at Harvard Medical School, in 1977 (when only 70,000 bypass surgeries were performed annually, compared to the million bypasses and angioplasties today) prophetically wrote, "An even more insidious problem is that what might be considered an 'industry' is being built around this operation..."

From an article by Julian Whitaker, M.D. 
Editor of Health and Healing, the world's 
largest-circulation health newsletter written by an M.D. 
For more information, call 1-800-861-5967