[redlizard]

“If it was me, I would try medical therapy first, but it depends on how severe the pain is,” Dr. Mack said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/neil-armstrong-hea...

If someone was 82, and a quality-of-life surgery is elected to be performed, it is always the patient and the doctors making that decision. Surgeries can go wrong, they carry risk, heart surgery more so, heart surgery with an 82 year old even more so. Should we be holding the health care system accountable? Even when the risks are known? Do we all of a sudden have the expectation that every open heart surgery will be successful and no one will die? Hospitals shouldn't be rewarded for failures, but placing full blame on an organization with an impossible mandate seems a little bit unfair.

[dandelany]

Based on the details in both articles, this seems like a mischaracterization. The issue is not the fact that he died after an inherently risky operation - it's that the doctors (allegedly) made mistakes afterward that unnecessarily increased the risk and potentially cost him his life.

"Do patients always die if wire removal causes bleeding? No — it is very rare, surgeons said. Patients should be rushed to the operating room ... But Mr. Armstrong was taken to a cardiac catheterization lab first, before he went to surgery. The cath lab, Dr. Haft said, 'is not the solution.' ... By the time Mr. Armstrong got to the operating room, his heart had stopped and he had brain damage from a lack of blood to his brain. He died without regaining consciousness."

"The expert reviews focus on the hospital’s decision to bring Mr. Armstrong to a catheterization lab rather than directly to an operating room when he began to experience complications. 'The decision to go to the cath lab was THE major error,' Dr. Joseph Bavaria, a vice-chair of cardiothoracic surgery at University of Pennsylvania wrote in a review conducted at the request of the Armstrong family."

[Spooky23]

As someone who lost a loved one to cdiff and mrsa infections, I would hope to expect a basic level of competence in a hospital, which is increasingly not there.

[reallydude]

Having personally had 3 open heart surgeries (where they remove your heart, do work and put it back), it's important to pay attention to which hospitals are the best at which types of care.

Veteran care has improved drastically since the first Bush administration (might have been started with Clinton, I dunno for sure). Cheney used VA hospitals for full body scans, etc which my father casually used as a reason to get his own. All veterans are equal in the VA now.

Largely, hospitals ALL have a basic level of competence in the US (meaning medical training and certification and subject to regulation) and it's disrespectful to imply otherwise. There is no benefit to people dying in a hospital. Nobody wins and the penalties are stiff. The staff are people, which are imperfect (often overworked) and situations are fluid.

The idea that opening him up again was going to save him, is tenuous. It would not surprise me to find the implant wires caused angina; given his history it would be warranted that a nurse would move the patient to cath, since the heart can only survive so many "insults". A nurse is not a doctor and doctors (especially cardiologists) are RARELY walking around, especially in that facility at that time. The nurse made a call and a patient died that may have died anyway waiting for a doctor to make the decision.

[Spooky23]

> Largely, hospitals ALL have a basic level of competence in the US (meaning medical training and certification and subject to regulation) and it's disrespectful to imply otherwise. There is no benefit to people dying in a hospital. Nobody wins and the penalties are stiff. The staff are people, which are imperfect (often overworked) and situations are fluid.

No way. Look at the Centers for Medicare Services ratings and check out the shitshow that lower rated hospitals are. When you see high cdiff infections, that’s a sign of general incompetence — poor hygiene, undertrained or untrained staff, or insufficient staffing levels.

Disrespect is allowing patients to suffer needlessly. The people running those facilities deserve none.