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AF ablation Atrial fibrillation General Cardiology General Medicine Healthy Living inflammation Nutrition

Inflammation, Ablation, Fats, LDL, etc .. My review of ESC 2017

The European Cardiology Congress, ESC as it is called, has grown into the largest medical meeting in the world. This year, more than 31,000 attendees from 153 countries came to Barcelona. I was busy. Here is an update of the big stories: Inflammation:  Experts agree that inflammation associates with heart disease. One of the keys […]

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Athletic heart Atrial fibrillation Dabigatran/Rivaroxaban/Apixaban Doctoring General Cardiology General Medicine Health Care Healthy Living Knowledge Nutrition

Statins, Like All Medicines, Are Neither Good Nor Bad

We have to talk about drugs. No, not illicit drugs, but medications used by doctors and patients. Plaintiff attorneys run ads on TV that fool people into thinking certain meds are bad. The current one I deal with is the clot-blocking drug rivaroxaban (Xarelto.) Before that, it was dabigatran (Pradaxa). If, or when, the makers […]

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AF ablation Atrial fibrillation Dabigatran/Rivaroxaban/Apixaban Doctoring Exercise General Cardiology Healthy Living ICD/Pacemaker Nutrition

A short take of the big stories in cardiology in 2015

Here is my most recent column on theHeart.org | Medscape Cardiology: Mandrola’s Top 10 Cardiology Stories 2015 What follows below is a short-writing summary of my ten picks. The hyperlinks go to earlier columns I wrote on the topic. 1. The FDA approved two new (injectable) cholesterol drugs. The problem with the PCSK9-inhibitors: the study […]

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Atrial fibrillation Healthy Living inflammation Nutrition

Good health does not require an Apple Watch

Social media is awash in news about digital health. I am a skeptic. Health is much simpler. I like this rendering from a kindergarten class. "Kindergarten teacher asked class to create rules for living healthy. Here's what they came up with" via @rickplus3 pic.twitter.com/cRmHfcfjrf — Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) May 9, 2015 When I was a […]

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AF ablation Doctoring General Medicine Health Care Healthy Living Nutrition Social Media/Writing/Blogging

Medicine, lifestyle disease and the pool-safety post

What follows is an introduction to my most recent post on theHeart.org | Medscape Cardiology. It was published yesterday. Many of the comments are excellent. The link is at the end of this post. You might wonder what pool-safety has to do with lifestyle disease. Here is how they relate: I am currently reading an […]

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AF ablation Atrial fibrillation Healthy Living Nutrition

Major breakthrough in AF ablation

A study published recently in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology will change a way of thinking about the disease atrial fibrillation. And it’s about time. One word describes AF therapy in the past decade: plateau. Ten years have passed and we have no new drugs and no real breakthrough in AF ablation. […]

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Atrial fibrillation Cycling Wed Cyclocross Exercise General Medicine Health Care Healthy Living inflammation Nutrition

Public health is on the ballot this Election Day

The election I am going to watch today is in San Francisco. On the ballot there is Proposition E, an initiative to add a 2-cent tax for every once of sugary beverage. Choose Health SF, a group supporting the tax, estimates it would raise $54 million, which would go towards, get this: “funding active recreation […]

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AF ablation Atrial fibrillation Doctoring Health Care Healthy Living Nutrition Social Media/Writing/Blogging

Writing about lifestyle modification — and blaming the patient

I was pleased when the editors of the TheHeart.org reposted my recent essay, Let’s Stop the Unnecessary Treatment of Heart Disease. As of this morning, there are 167 comments. The majority of them were positive, and supportive of lifestyle promotion. Negative comments represented a small minority, but were notable in their vigor, and occasionally reached […]

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AF ablation Doctoring Exercise General Medicine Healthy Living Nutrition

Let’s stop the unnecessary treatment of heart disease

There are many reasons doctors suffer from burnout and compassion fatigue. One of the least-mentioned of these reasons is that much of what we do is so damn unnecessary. In the US, the land of excess everything, caregivers, especially cardiologists, spend most of our time treating human beings that didn’t need to have disease. Let’s […]

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AF ablation Atrial fibrillation Doctoring General Cardiology General Medicine Healthy Living Nutrition

Is this the most important cardiology study of the last decade?

In recent years, progress in the field of cardiology has been painfully incremental. We have enjoyed small gains–a better ablation catheter and mapping system, a couple of new anti-platelet drugs, maybe better stents, and even the highly touted anticoagulant drugs are within 99% in efficacy and safety of warfarin. Major breakthroughs, though, are non-existent. (And […]

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Health Care Healthy Living inflammation Nutrition

Dear Girl Scouts: It’s time to cut out the cookies

It happened while I was leaving a grocery store in the southeastern United States. The young girl who asked me if I wanted to buy Girl Scout cookies was strikingly perfect. She was thin, happy, and well spoken. So were her colleagues. The moms, too, were of healthy weight and cheer. It was as if […]