My Paul Wood Lecture at the British Cardiac Society

I recently had the honor to give the Paul Wood Lecture at the British Cardiovascular Society meeting in Manchester.

My topic was a broad one.

Many of the previous Paul Wood lecturers are people who generate medical evidence.

As a practicing doctor, I am only a user of said evidence. My interest, and the focus of this newsletter, is the appraisal and translation of that evidence to patient care.

The Introduction

Paul Wood practiced in the 1940-1960s. His problem was different from our problem.

Dr. Wood died of an acute myocardial infarction at age 55. He looked at his own ECG, said it was “irreversible,” made himself a do-not-resuscitate, and died hours later of an arrhythmia.

Innovation has now transformed the care of patients with acute MI. If Paul Wood lived today, one of my colleagues in interventional cardiology would have opened the blocked artery and saved him. Most likely, Dr. Wood would have been discharged the next day with a Band-Aid on his wrist and normal heart function.

Here’s the problem: the absolute beauty of acute-MI care is an outlier.

Much of modern medicine is far more subtle and incremental. And that is where the ability to appraise medical evidence comes in. As the slide says, the major question for modern cardiologists is not having enough to do, but the question of whether to do it in the first place.

In future posts, I will expand on the concepts that I showed in appraising and using modern medical evidence.

Thanks for your support. Stay tuned. JMM