Posted by Pati Murdock on February 06, 2003 at 07:39:27:
In Reply to: On to the Cleveland Clinic posted by Jim Matthews on February 05, 2003 at 13:48:01:
Jim--I've just returned home from a maze at the CC. Although the research I had done made me sure the maze was the surer option, at the CC both Dr. Hammer and Dr. McCarthy discussed both options with me to be sure I knew all the ups and downs of both. BOTH of them finally admitted that ablation scares the patients less but that it is not as safe as the maze and that the primary side effect of ablation, PV Stenosis, is a big deal. "You don't want to be there", Dr. Hammer told me. By the time I had left the clinic, they had done 386 Mazes and had only 1 failure, by which they mean it did not cure the AF. And the one failure was in a guy that had serious valve disease.