Fixing hearts, damaging brains
Subtitle: the tangled history of cardiac care
By: David S. Jones
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 319
ISBN-13: 9781421408019; 9781421408026
Subjects: Postoperative Complications; Physiopathology; Atherosclerosis; Etiology; Cardiovascular Surgical Procedures; Complications; Adverse effects; Myocardial Infarction
Description: "Still the leading cause of death worldwide, heart disease challenges researchers, clinicians, and patients alike. Each day, thousands of patients and their doctors make decisions about coronary angioplasty and bypass surgery. In Broken Hearts David S. Jones sheds light on the nature and quality of those decisions. He describes the debates over what causes heart attacks and the efforts to understand such unforeseen complications of cardiac surgery as depression, mental fog, and stroke.

Why do doctors and patients overestimate the effectiveness and underestimate the dangers of medical interventions, especially when doing so may lead to the overuse of medical therapies? To answer this question, Jones explores the history of cardiology and cardiac surgery in the United States and probes the ambiguities and inconsistencies in medical decision making. Based on extensive reviews of medical literature and archives, this historical perspective on medical decision making and risk highlights personal, professional, and community outcomes."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The mysteries of heart attacks; title: The case for plaque rupture; title: The case against plaque rupture; title: Learning by doing; title: The plaque rupture consensus; title: Rupture therapeutics; title: Therapeutic ruptures; title: Fear and unpredictability; title: Surgical ambition and fear; title: Suffering cerebrums; title: Deliriogenic personalities; title: The case of the missing complications; title: Selective inattention; title: The cerebral complications of coronary artery bypass surgery; title: A taxonomy of inattention; title: Competition's complications.