Did You Ever Notice?

To quote the late 60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney, "did you ever notice" how documentary movies--we could extend this to all sorts of documentation as Lancet does it far better than any American medical journals--on anechoic topics seem to come mostly from the Brits?A telling new example: the just-released film The Widowmaker, found both here online and in a few E and W Coast theaters. (Real world locations given at above link. Seemingly, and sadly, no red states need apply.)Widowmaker, boasting fine production values and an 'A' team of Gillian Anderson (fittingly of X-Files fame!) and the director of the Wikileaks films, puts a crack in the anechoic wall by pitting two expensive industry-led campaigns against one another: that in favor of CAC (calcium) scores and that in favor of DES (drug eluting stents) for coronary disease..One comes away from this film with mixed feelings. There are fine moments of mirth, such as when standard EBM quasi-nihilistic talking-head Steve Nissen says "I don't like cost," whereupon the Texas state legislator and CAC true-believer RenĂ© Oliveira responds "he's an idiot." (The latter quoted in the recent, and acutely observed, NY Times review here.)Um, boys, so many of you are heart patients--as indeed is your faithful blogger himself--but can we unpack this a bit?OK, so should everybody in the world, or everybody with a family history, or everybody who ever smoked, get an expensive scan to stratify treatment?...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs