“The reason to avoid a heart and vascular paradigm is [that] there really is no paradigm. There’s no set standard for how these things should function. There’s certainly no evidence that they benefit patient care,” says Malachi Sheahan III, MD, newly elected Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) secretary.
He continues: “And really what they’re set up as is a trap. And it’s a trap for the downstream financial revenue that’s generated by cardiologists, interventional radiology, CT surgeons and vascular surgeons. […] I think when we scale us to that size, we’re going to fail.”
Sheahan is a professor of surgery at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) in New Orleans. He serves as chair of the Department of Surgery and chief of the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery. He is also the medical editor of Vascular Specialist, the SVS newspaper.
