How does the diagnosis change?

Walk into an Emergency room with Chest Pain ALONE you get a cardiac workup.

Just eating at Taco Bell and a parental history of having both parents living to 100 will not save you from an EKG, IV, baby asa, blood draw for enzymes.


Well...this is about HOW MUCH credence YOU want to give to family history....if the only risk factor someone has for heart disease is family history...how far you wanting to go to rule it out?

If it is really worth all this weight...why wouldn't you cath someone?

I'll tell you why cardiologists don't....because it is a weak and realatively poor indicator when weighed against EVERYTHING else going on with the patient.

As far as you feeling I shouldn't treat the living, I could give a rats....I've done it for almost 30 years and will do it again tomorrow...I stress peoples hearts EVERY day I go to work...it is my livelyhood that depends on my abilities to evaluate cardiovascular risks...and I would line up my credentials next to yours anyday of the week....and I could care less about your daddys health...I know of NO Anesthesiology professional when meeting you for the first time at the bedside before taking you back to have your intestines laid on your chest ask you about your mommy and daddy.

If you want to push this weak line that McCain is going to die in office because of his daddys health...keep right at....I will be glad to shoot the weight you give to mommy and daddy down with every pathetic post.

There is no straw in reducing mommy and daddy's history on down the line of risk factors when there are many more far more significant.


Perhaps you can answer why you felt it important to state:

But it would be foolish to ignore the reality of his age and medical history.

Why would it be foolish to ignore his age and medical history?


The Veep choice who has more Executive experience than your man at the top of the ticket?

The Veep choice who actually won a contested election as opposed to the unopposed coronation of your man at the top of the ticket?

Again....I find Veep choices insignificant for reasons I stated earlier....because it really is about the two at the top of the ticket.

If you want to complain about the lack of experience at the bottom of the ticket...you can thank Obama and his empty resume' for setting the bar so incredibly low....

Patton, you are being disingenuous here - in fact, you are abusing your acknowledged medical expertise. (I'm quite disappointed in you, actually.) It is a well known fact that age and family history (which means genetics) are risk factors when it comes to heart conditions. Do I need to start quoting sources?

In any case, that isn't this issue. The point of the thread was that the talk of experience turned out to be meaningless, since McCain just went ahead and put a woman with little experience a heart attack away from the Presidency.

Just driving by and hate to interrupt this entirely and very serious discussion, but can a bit of humor hurt? Most likely, but i really don't mind the resulting attacks. Even some guys enjoy "chick flicks" and Maureen today provides a scenario of the White House, following a sudden death of McCain.  Enjoy or not.  Not bothering with a link as it ruins the story. 

August 31, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Vice in Go-Go Boots?

By MAUREEN DOWD
PITTSBURGH

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I’m out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

So imagine my delight, my absolute astonishment, when the hokey chick flick came out on the trail, a Cinderella story so preposterous it’s hard to believe it’s not premiering on Lifetime. Instead of going home and watching “Miss Congeniality” with Sandra Bullock, I get to stay here and watch “Miss Congeniality” with Sarah Palin.

Sheer heaven.

It’s easy to see where this movie is going. It begins, of course, with a cute, cool unknown from Alaska who has never even been on “Meet the Press” triumphing over a cute, cool unknowable from Hawaii who has been on “Meet the Press” a lot.

Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested.

Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?

Obama may have been president of The Harvard Law Review, but Palin graduated from the University of Idaho with a minor in poli-sci and worked briefly as a TV sports reporter. And she was tougher on the basketball court than the ethereal Obama, earning the nickname “Sarah Barracuda.”

The legacy of Geraldine Ferraro was supposed to be that no one would ever go on a blind date with history again. But that crazy maverick and gambler McCain does it, and conservatives and evangelicals rally around him in admiration of his refreshingly cynical choice of Sarah, an evangelical Protestant and anti-abortion crusader who became a hero when she decided to have her baby, who has Down syndrome, and when she urged schools to debate creationism as well as that stuffy old evolution thing.

Palinistas, as they are called, love Sarah’s spunky, relentlessly quirky “Northern Exposure” story from being a Miss Alaska runner-up, and winning Miss Congeniality, to being mayor and hockey mom in Wasilla, a rural Alaskan town of 6,715, to being governor for two years to being the first woman ever to run on a national Republican ticket. (Why do men only pick women as running mates when they need a Hail Mary pass? It’s a little insulting.)

Sarah is a zealot, but she’s a fun zealot. She has a beehive and sexy shoes, and the day she’s named she goes shopping with McCain in Ohio for a cheerleader outfit for her daughter.

As she once told Vogue, she’s learned the hard way to deal with press comments about her looks. “I wish they’d stick with the issues instead of discussing my black go-go boots,” she said. “A reporter once asked me about it during the campaign, and I assured him I was trying to be as frumpy as I could by wearing my hair on top of my head and these schoolmarm glasses.”

This chick flick, naturally, features a wild stroke of fate, when the two-year governor of an oversized igloo becomes commander in chief after the president-elect chokes on a pretzel on day one.

The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it’s close to Alaska. “Back off, Commie dude,” she says. “I’m a much better shot than Cheney.”

Then she takes off in her seaplane and lands on the White House lawn, near the new ice fishing hole and hockey rink. The “First Dude,” as she calls the hunky Eskimo in the East Wing, waits on his snowmobile with the kids — Track (named after high school track meets), Bristol (after Bristol Bay where they did commercial fishing), Willow (after a community in Alaska), Piper (just a cool name) and Trig (Norse for “strength.”)

“The P.T.A. is great preparation for dealing with the K.G.B.,” President Palin murmurs to Todd, as they kiss in the final scene while she changes Trig’s diaper. “Now that Georgia’s safe, how ’bout I cook you up some caribou hot dogs and moose stew for dinner, babe?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/opinion/31dowd.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Since I seriously doubt your ability to correctly decipher the literature....perhaps you can link to the source that states verbatim: Family history is one of the best indicators of predisposition to many, many medical conditions (since medical literature is not written in such a way)

Awaiting that....even if you find something that comes close to stating this (I have serious doubts)....ONE of the best means there are more...what are they?  How does family history stack up next to these other "best" indicaters?

Predisposition=tendency

Standing on a curb is a predisposition to crossing a street...but not a gaurentee.

Poverty is a predisposition to a poor education...but not a gaurentee.

Being female predisposes one to pregnancy....but is not a gaurentee.

You've got some powerful data there bub.....

Are you really claiming with this question not to see a difference between putting a woman with 2 years executive governmental experience a heart beat from the most powerful position in the country, and putting a man with zero years executive governmental experience actually IN the most powerful position in the land?

To answer your question, no, the selection does not show that the talk of experience is hollow.  I am not saying that it is not hollow, and I am not saying it was not all empty PR.  I am just saying this selection does not demonstrate any such thing.