Unless you consider a life in which walking to the corner without disabling chest pain requires taking a nitroglycerin tablet before setting out, then stopping halfway to take another — and in which the side effects of the intensive medical (i.e., drug) treatment can include sleep disturbances, fatigue, mental confusion, and impotence — to be no different from a pain-free life of relatively normal function, following an invasive revascularization procedure, like bypass surgery or angioplasty.

The cardiologists who treat patients with coronary disease day in and day out seem to think, however, that there is a very big difference between those two lives — and are grateful that we now have effective treatments that can restore these patients to a near-normal life, even if those lives are not a minute longer than they would have been without the procedures.