OUWBSOM faculty member David Haines publishes editorial

In the United States, the two leading medical journals are the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Recently, an Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine (OUWBSOM) faculty member, Dr. David Haines, published an editorial in JAMA about “Automated External Defibrillators and the Law of Unintended Consequences” (Volume 304, Pages 2178-2179). Haines was invited to submit an editorial about an article in the same issue describing a clinical study showing that when used in a hospital, an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) can lower survival for patients who suffer from those types of heart arrhythmias for which a defibrillator is not the appropriate treatment. (Click here for an AARP article on this topic, and here for an article in Science Daily) The problem seems to be that a lot of time is spent setting up and using the AED, during which cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) must be stopped. If the patient didn’t need a defibrillation shock after all, this lost time leads to a worse outcome.

Haines is the chief of the division of cardiovascular medicine at Beaumont Hospitals in Royal Oak, MI, and a clinical faculty member in the OUWBSOM. He is a pioneer in the development of catheter ablation, a technique to cure some heart arrhythmias, such as atrial fibrillation, by using radiofrequency energy to destroy a small region of tissue responsible for the disorder. The OUWBSOM is currently evaluating applications for its inaugural class of students in Fall 2011. For a virtual tour of the OUWBSOM, click here.