Why Use Stents When They Don’t Work? 

Again and again, studies have shown that doctors tend to make clinical decisions for patients based on how much they themselves will get paid. In 2007, we learned from the COURAGE trial that angioplasty and stents—percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)—don’t reduce the risk of death or heart attack, but patients didn’t seem to get the memo. Only 1 percent realize there was no mortality or heart attack benefit, perhaps because most cardiologists fail to mention that fact. One can imagine that if patients actually understood that symptomatic relief was all they were going to get, with “no addi