I have long endured the TV ads suggesting that patients “ask” their doctors about the new and, I am sure, very expensive medications that have recently been added to the formulary. Now comes along a new advice from Medtronic to ask one’s doctor about an implanted defibrillator. The ingenious executive who dreamt this up deserves a raise from his or her $20 million-per-year salary to at least $50 million annually. This is a no-lose situation. Someone in the U.S. has a coronary heart disease event every 29 seconds. There are 325,000 adult sudden deaths per year in this country. Now if one does as Medtronic suggests, if the doctor declines to put in the defibrillator, and the individual drops dead as sooner or later we all must depart, then that hero of us all, the mal-practice attorney, arrives on the scene.
I think I can foresee a day in the near future when almost everybody over the age of 45 is walking about with an implanted defibrillator.
