Main 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.

Contents:

List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Embarrassment of Riches
Part I: Theory and Therapy
Chapter 1. The Mysteries of Heart Attacks
Chapter 2. The Case for Plaque Rupture
Chapter 3. The Case against Plaque Rupture
Chapter 4. Learning by Doing
Chapter 5. The Plaque Rupture Consensus
Chapter 6. Rupture Therapeutics
Chapter 7. Therapeutic Ruptures
Chapter 8. Fear and Unpredictability
Part II: Complications
Chapter 9. Surgical Ambition and Fear
Chapter 10. Suffering Cerebrums
Chapter 11. Deliriogenic Personalities
Chapter 12. The Case of the Missing Complications
Chapter 13. Selective Inattention
Chapter 14. The Cerebral Complications of Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery
Chapter 15. A Taxonomy of Inattention
Chapter 16. Competition's Complications
Conclusion: Puzzles and Prospects
Notes
Bibliography
Index