Should smokers and the obese be denied coronary artery bypass surgery?
Reading this might be a temporary escape from reality. There are still people who believe that “personal responsibility” extends to every conceivable part of life, so long as that life is someone else’s. Coronary artery bypass surgery is a routine life-saving procedure that we perform thousands of times daily in the United States. Though the immediate aftercare regimen indicates that recovery is painful, the patient likely will survive years more than the likely prognosis without the surgery. Who Is More Deserving? There is a puzzling dichotomy here. Some people believe that, on some cosmic whiteboard, God or fate or karma keeps score when we threaten our own health. They are certain that more resources would be made available in our medical system, and to more “qualified” individuals, if only we made “the hard choices” about how Patient X got here. Who is this Patient X? This is the 36-year-old father of three whose cholesterol and hypertension measures were off the chart last week. H
