Know your heart specialist

IF you have chest pain and have been found to have significant blockage of your heart arteries, you can opt for only medication, open heart bypass surgery or a procedure to open blocked heart arteries with balloon catheters and stents (miniature cylindrical meshes that expand to open up blocked artery segments), also termed as percutaneous coronary intervention or PCI.

Medication versus procedure

A few months ago, there was a discussion on the treatment options for heart patients in my class Facebook account which was open to all my medical school ex-classmates. An ex-classmate, who was a family physician, was of the view that all patients with heart disease should only take medication and should not opt for PCI or open heart bypass surgery. He opined that since heart patients needed only medication, no testing was required. He formed his views after looking at the conclusions of two studies called the COURAGE trial and the BARI 2D trial which appeared to show that medication alone was as good as the other two options for patients who were stable.