OBJECTIVE To describe trends in the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) following the COURAGE trial, which found that medical therapy is as effective as PCI for patients with stable angina. DATA SOURCES We used the National Hospital Discharge Survey; inpatient and outpatient discharge data from Florida, Maryland, and New Jersey; and the English Hospital Episode Statistics database...

On at least one prominent and traditional view, courage involves actions undertaken to accomplish an important objective in the face of danger to the person performing the action. The danger may be to one’s physical or psychological well being, or to one’s reputation, professional standing, or personal relationships. Such actions are, moreover, usually distinguished from rash, foolish, or reckl...

arrangements for physical illness. Patients are to be admitted without formality?so that even voluntary status is an unnecessary concept: safeguards and standards of individual care are to be those that any doctor or hospital authority would naturally employ. The needs of the patient are more important in determining the type of hospital he goes to than scientific classifications. All this mean...

Two ethical frameworks have dominated the discussion of organ donation for long: that of property rights and that of gift-giving. However, recent years have seen a drastic rise in the number of philosophical analyses of the meaning of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in ethical debates on organ donation and in critical sociological, anthropological and ethnological work on the gif...

BACKGROUND Clinical uncertainty is cited as a cause of geographic variation. However, little is known about the effect of comparative effectiveness research on variation. We examined whether geographic variation in the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for stable ischemic heart disease (SIHD) declined after publication of the Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggre...