AW: [HSF] Percutaneous Valves

[Tohru Asai]

Nand
At the biginning of PTCA, quite a few cardiac surgeons got involved in PTCA
in Japan! ( They routinely performed preop and postop catheterization and
even used to teach cardiologists how to do it!). Now I live in the country,
where CABG to PCI ratio is almost one to 10-20. This was not due to Japanese
cv surgeons' laziness for PCI involvement, but something else. Obviously,
evidence is ours, ie CABG is better than multi PCI in severe triple vessel.
But there are so many guys who simply don't care EBM, longterm outcome, or
even anything after cath lab theater. The bottom line is that they are
sitting in the upstream of patient flow (I think Hal pointed out).

There is an old saying, "when a man have something he want to do, he can
easily make up many reasons to justify it."

What is really irritating me is their intentional ignorance of our practice.
IMHO, criticism probably produce nothing. But don't worry, no matter how the
surgeons get involved, we will be left out as long as their sitting in the
upstream. We should be competent enough to receive any sicker patients, as
long as we want to stay alive without changing our specialty to
cardiologists. More essentially, our "strong" surgical representatives needs
to get involved in guidelines creation, as David Taggart must have adressed.
-- 
Tohru Asai

> I think,
> instead of criticising the cardiologists, the surgeons need to be involved
> in the procedure right from the beginning, so that we are not left out.
> Nand