The All-New Bunrab

crustycurmudgeo

Docs wire up world's first internet-connected pacemaker

Beware the Ping O' Death

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And an adventure: we attempted to go to Ben Cardin's health care town hall this evening. Arriving at 5:30, we were still too late to get in - the line was already more people than the capacity of the hall and standing room combined. But we did participate in a few of MoveOn's chants a wave a few signs, and we spent some time waiting in line before finding out it was hopeless. And while we waiting in line, I had some civil discussions with "them" - the wingnuts with the death panel and hitler nonsense - and we even managed to reach a couple of small points of agreement, so I don't feel the time was wasted. One woman was handing out a table of alleged wait times for specialists under the Canadian plan, and saying how horrible that would be; I told her something she apparently didn't know, namely how long the wait for specialists is right now here in the USA if you don't happen to have the advanced super-premium health care insurance. With some guys, we veered off onto other topics, and I got them to agree that my riding a 65 mpg. motorcycle might actually be at least as worthwhile a move to reduce our foreign oil dependence as their idea of drilling in ANWR. I gave another person a complete rundown on exactly how complicated prescription drug plans currently are, and how many staff CVS employs in figuring out all the different plans, vs. actually doing pharmacy stuff like discussing medicines with patients. And with a few people, we managed to at least civilly arrive at an agreement that ANY plan devised by committees of multiple human beings who answer to multiple special interest was going to have flaws in it, including the current ones.

I also explained Godwin's Law to a few wingnuts who didn't want to hear it, but I felt better. Clearly, people who try to conflate Obama and Hitler have lost so many screws that there's really no point in trying to reason with them.

Cardiac Device Won't Help Some Heart Failure Patients
They performed no better with Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy, researchers say

TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Heart failure patients treated with a device that synchronizes pumping in the heart's ventricles showed no improvement in exercise capacity, researchers report.

The results were presented Tuesday at a late-breaking clinical trial session at the American Heart Association's annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla., and were expected to be published in the Dec. 13 print issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) devices are surgically implanted and deliver electrical impulses to both ventricles at the same time, making both chambers contract simultaneously and thereby improving pumping efficiency.

While current guidelines support using CRT in patients with moderate to severe heart failure, this study aimed to see if the device could benefit patients outside those recommended parameters.

For this trial, 172 heart failure patients were randomly assigned to receive treatment with CRT or not.

Those treated with CRT showed no significant improvement in exercise capacity as measured by peak oxygen consumption. Some symptoms did improve, but quality-of-life scores and results of the six-minute hall walk test did not change significantly, the researchers reported.

"There was no significant difference in the change in peak oxygen consumption between the treatment group and the control group during cardiopulmonary testing," Dr. John Beshai, study lead author and director of pacemaker and defibrillator services in the division of cardiology at the University of Chicago, said at a news conference Tuesday. "Further research is necessary," he said.

The trial was funded by St. Jude Medical, which makes the CRT device.