According to The New England Journal of Medicine, for every one thousand nonemergency angioplasties in America, two patients died on the operating table, twenty-eight suffered heart attacks brought on by the procedure, between sixty and ninety experienced a “transient” improvement in their health, and the rest—about eight hundred people—experienced neither benefit nor harm (unless of course you count the cost, the loss of time, and the anxiety of surgery as harm, in which case there was plenty). Despite this, angioplasties remain extremely popular. In 2013,
