@HelloRaptor said:
I can't find any references to Sea-Med or to this alternative to balloon angioplasty you mentioned.
Really? Because it took me two googles and a couple of click-throughs worth of effort to find out that the company was called 'SeaMED' and got acquired by and folded into Plexus Corp, and the device was called the Rotoblator Rotational Angioplasty System, whose patent was sold to and is now held by the Boston Scientific Corporation.
From other articles it looks as if it's not strictly an alternative in the sense that a lot of doctors aren't trained in its use anywhere but in the US, and even in the US the balloon method is still pretty common because the rotational system requires a lot of training, and the original method 'works well enough'.
I will admit to conformational bias. My bias is, frankly, that much of the time you're just talking shit.
Maybe you're bad at google? That or you just didn't try very hard because you just wanted an excuse to justify your knee jerk attack on somebody who dared to criticize the Canadian health care system.
This isn't Canadian boosterism as much as it is that I think Shebakoby often repeats half-understood things as gospel truth, and I've thought that for a while. This was just something that seemed worth calling him/her out on.
I honestly didn't find "SeaMED" because I was preserving the space in the name. Once I didn't find that, I started looking for angioplasty alternatives and found nothing. I'm glad you found references to the Rotablator when I couldn't, though part of the problem I had was that the device wasn't developed by SeaMED but instead by Heart Technology, which was bought by Boston Scientific. SeaMED just did/does instrument assembly: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=480403.
Still, what Shebakoby said was that "Canada still doesn't have this [Rotablator] technology" as proof for the statement, "There's maybe only one thing that the US system, as flawed as it is, has over the Canadian system. Money available for R&D." There's no direct relationship between these two things. This technology has been researched and developed, and what I read says that it is an alternative when stenting is not effective (though it sounds like it's tricky - a 2010 article talked about having to do emergency surgery after the drive shaft broke off in a patient's coronary artery). It could be that it's not used in Canada because it's thought to be too expensive, or only used at major medical centers because of the difficulty or the cost, or any number of other things, some of which certainly would point to flaws in the Canadian health system. What was offered as evidence, though, doesn't match that.
