December 10, 2019- by Steven E. Greer, MD
In my recent book, The Medical Advocate, I excoriated the cardiology community, particularly interventionalists, as being unethical mafia-like bad actors. Marty Leon’s TCT has been their home headquarters and preferred venue for junk science. Well, they did it again:
Medscape recently reported, “In September, Gregg Stone, MD, from Mount Sinai in New York presented 5-year results of the EXCEL trial at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2019 conference. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) simultaneously published the results, with the conclusion that “there was no significant difference between percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and CABG with respect to the rate of the composite outcome of death, stroke, or myocardial infarction at 5 years.”
About a week later, at the European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS) meeting, numerous speakers questioned this no-difference claim. The consensus from the discussion at this surgical conference was that PCI looked worse than CABG in longer-term follow-up.
Steve Stiles has excellent news coverage of the EXCEL controversy. My take is that the topline finding—that both treatments are essentially similar—is misleading and could potentially lead to future harm.”
The BBC covered the topic as well, and the NEJM was drawn into the controversy for agreeing to publish the fraudulent results. The NEJM has mastered the art of accepting drug and device industry money and then publishing unworthy data laden with statistical manipulation. At the same time, the editors and opinion writers consistently take the far-left liberal side of any medical debate, pretending to be pro-single-payer despite publishing papers from the worst offenders of the fee-for-service waste in the New England region.