Best Medical Intervention for Arterial Disease or Wishful Thinking

Medical treatment of aortic stenosis: promising, or wishful thinking?

Valvular aortic stenosis (AS) is a prevalent condition and one of the most common indications for valve replacement surgery. Although AS can be congenital in etiology or a consequence of rheumatic fever, the most common form is “calcific” AS. Calcific AS is usually seen in patients over the age of 65 years, and as the population continues to grow older, the number of patients with AS is almost ...

Surrogate endpoints: wishful thinking or reality?

Wishful Thinking

and we will write to you when there is a bed available yes I know it's painful, and six months is a long time to wait, but I am afraid we have already lost two wards this year because of the cuts. Mrs Thatcher keeps taking money away from us to spend on Trident Missiles Yes I wish you would write to your Member of Parliament about it. Hello Sister, is it tea time yet? Sister: Not yet I'm afraid...

Wishful Thinking

An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset’s historical price chart, and received both an accuracy bonus for predicting the price at some future point, and an unconditional award that was either increasing or decreasing in this price. Despite incentives for hedging...

"Fishing" for the origins of the "Eskimos and heart disease" story: facts or wishful thinking?

During the 1970s, 2 Danish investigators, Bang and Dyerberg, on being informed that the Greenland Eskimos had a low prevalence of coronary artery disease (CAD) set out to study the diet of this population. Bang and Dyerberg described the "Eskimo diet" as consisting of large amounts of seal and whale blubber (ie, fats of animal origin) and suggested that this diet was a key factor in the alleged...