Many patients clearly felt better. Some who had been bedridden could now walk around the block. So doctors now are trying a less invasive method of burning holes, by threading a wire-like laser through an artery from the patient's groin up to the heart. That procedure is still highly experimental. While Shawl has performed it and contends it helps patients who couldn't survive surgery, he says the laser wire is difficult to control, and flops around as it's positioned in the heart.
Good control is crucial to keep holes from boring so deep that they punch through the heart wall.
It might help prove a theory that drilling the holes stimulates the heart to grow new blood vessels, much like a new scar on skin turns pink as blood vessels form during healing. He says scientists haven't proven that the benefit of laser drilling isn't just a placebo effect. After all, other studies have failed to find new blood vessels or better blood perfusion, Lange said. But Shawl points to Ridgeway as evidence of the needle-drill's promise. Yet Ridgeway went home 24 hours after undergoing the experimental needle drilling, not cured but insisting he felt better, and Shawl has patients from as far away as England lined up to test it too.