Recent advances: Cardiac surgery

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Abstract
When medical advances are announced in the popular media even the best read doctors are put in a position where their patients seem more up to date than they, and specialists are upstaged by friends and colleagues who heard the latest advance on the radio before breakfast. How is the average medical practitioner, hearing these broadcasts or reading about them in the Sunday papers, to know were to place these self proclaimed advances in the context of cardiac surgery? I will attempt to do this, but I cannot tell you whether they will lead somewhere important or if they are among the many blind alleys we enter in our search for a way ahead. The research cul-de-sac usually becomes forgotten, but at the time it might have seemed as likely a route to take as any other.