The latest, most extensive research suggests that the new gear, now found in nearly all hospitals, saves fewer lives than the old, lower-tech defibrillators…“I think they jumped the gun,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. “Why would we want to dumb things down to a level of having a machine do the thinking for us?” Or, as Dr. Roger D. White, who was on a heart association subcommittee that provided advice on the defibrillator decision in 2000, put it: “We just assumed that we were going to make a difference.” White, an anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., added, “What we thought would work, hasn’t worked so far.”

Fair Warning, by Lilly Fowler, 11/15/11

Tags: Cardiology, Research