 The large national cardiology conferences may attract the majority of cardiologists in the entire country in one place. So hey, if you're going to have a heart attack, that would seem to be the place to do it. And indeed, that's when the American Heart Association president had his within hours of his presidential address. With so many of the nation's top cardiologists at the conference, maybe that's a bad time to go into cardiac arrest anywhere else, though you don't know until you put it to the test. To their surprise, they found substantially lower mortality among those going into cardiac failure or cardiac arrest during the big national cardiology meetings. Why is the death rate lower when most of the cardiologists are away? One potential explanation is that the intensity of care may be lower, suggesting the harms of such care may unexpectedly outweigh the benefits. Their results echo paradoxical findings documented during a labor strike by Israeli physicians, during which mortality rates evidently dramatically fell. And it wasn't just one strike. It's been looked at multiple times, and in all reported cases, mortality either stayed the same or decreased. In four of the seven cases, mortality dropped as a result of the strike, and in three there was no significant change. The fact is that many current medical practices have been found to offer no benefit and in fact potential harms, even physicians themselves estimated that about a fifth of medical care is unnecessary. National Summit was convened by the Joint Commission that accredits hospitals and the American Medical Association to identify areas of overuse, treatments that provide zero or negligible benefit, potentially exposing patients to a risk of harm for nothing. They called out five practices. For example, prescribing antibiotics for viral upper respiratory tract infections, spending a billion dollars prescribing drugs that don't work, and if anything just make things worse. But another overuse practice they identified was elective percutaneous coronary intervention. In other words, angioplasty and stents. Just to get everyone on the same page before we dive in, coronary artery disease, the number one killer of men and women, involves blockages in the blood vessels that supply the heart and muscle itself. Low blood flow can lead to a type of chest pain called angina, or if severe enough, to a heart attack. Plant-based diets and lifestyle programs have been shown to reverse these blockages by treating the cause of why our arteries are clogging up in the first place. But for those unable or unwilling to change their diets, there are drugs that can help, as well as more invasive treatments such as open-heart surgery to try to bypass the blockage or percutaneous coronary intervention. That's when doctors insert small balloons or metal tunnels called stents up through large blood vessels, typically in the groin, and thread them all the way up into the heart. That way, you can get inside the blocked vessels and try to open them up and prop them open. Now, during a heart attack, this can be life-saving, but hundreds of thousands of these procedures are done every year for stable angina, meaning on a non-emergency basis, which can relieve symptoms, but doesn't actually reduce your risk of having or dying from a heart attack in the future. However, not everyone knows that. I mean, they mistakenly think the procedure offers more than just symptom relief. That's one of the reasons I'm doing this video series. As Harvard put it, stents are for pain, not protection. But then, unbelievably, it was discovered that stents may not even help with pain. As revealed in this double-blind, randomized, controlled trial. Wait, you can blind people to the active treatment in drug trials by giving them a placebo sugar pill, but wouldn't you kind of notice if you got surgery or not? Like whether or not they cut into your groin? Not if you got sham surgery, placebo surgery, where they cut into everyone, thread up the catheter, and at the last moment, randomly actually do or do not actually place the actual stent. And those who got the fake surgery did just as well as those who got the regular surgery. Wait, there are no benefits to angioplasty in stents outside of an emergency setting. Doesn't prevent heart attacks, doesn't enable you to live longer, and doesn't even help with symptoms? And since the procedure carries some risks, including death, maybe stents should be used only by people who are actively having heart attacks. But wait, so hundreds of thousands of people are getting these operations for nothing? You know, the doctors justified it. That means they're just greed? I mean, how do they get patients to sign up? Do they just not tell them the truth? And wait, why doesn't it work? I mean, you are, after all, opening up a blocked artery. There's just so many questions which we'll start addressing next.