Word: bypass
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Stricken with the suffocating, spasmodic chest pains of severe angina, Robert, a 47-year-old chauffeur, recently entered Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital. Tests showed that his left main coronary artery was clogged with cholesterol-laden plaque. That made him a likely candidate for a coronary bypass, an operation in which segments of leg vein are sewn onto the arteries to shunt blood around blocked areas. But with Robert's approval, Lenox Hill doctors decided to forgo surgery and try a new and highly experimental alternative: a procedure with the tongue-twisting name of "percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty...
...successful in clearing soft, non-calcified plaque obstructions and relieving angina. (In three cases, doctors were unable to work the catheters through the arteries to the point of blockage.) The promising findings lead Chief of Medicine Michael Bruno to estimate that the procedure could be used in place of bypass operations in perhaps 10% to 15% of patients-and at about one-tenth the $15,000 average cost of a bypass...
...when the shouting finally died down, the VA investigators and their critics were closer to agreement than they admitted. Both emphasized the proper selection of patients. The surgeons conceded that most patients with chronic but stable angina (probably indicating only one blocked coronary artery) do not need a costly bypass. Most also agreed that for victims of the severest disease, characterized by a blockage in the left main coronary artery (a condition that Effler aptly calls "the widow-maker"), surgery is all but mandatory. The same is true for patients with progressive or uncontrollable angina who have two or three...
...economy from those who return to work are at least equal to the $ 1 billion costs of surgery. That is, admittedly, a top-of-the-head estimate. But Harvard's Dr. John J. Collins Jr. presented some convincing figures from one group of 100 patients who had had bypass surgery. According to Collins, these patients, who before surgery frequently required hospitalization, spent so much less time in hospitals after bypass operations that the saving over a period of about 4½ years equaled the cost of the surgery...
...forced resignation as budget boss last September, Lance has continued to have the ear of his friend Jimmy Carter, and he is not shy in flaunting his special status to prospective business partners. He has trotted around the world flourishing Diplomatic Passport X-000065, which allowed him to bypass customs and which the White House intervened to keep for him. Earlier in March an organization called Friendship Force, founded by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, invited businessmen to a luncheon to hear Lance report on "a ten-nation European visit with heads of state," although Lance had visited only five countries...