To the Editor:

Mr. Kraus and Dr. Suarez (1) provide facts and commentary about physician membership in Congress that should be viewed with care.

The authors calculate that non-physician members of Congressional serve a mean of 3 statistically insignificant years longer than physician members. Yet, a tenure difference of 2 years can be highly significant legislatively because committee chairmanships, from where power in Congress emanates, are few in number and are traditionally determined by strict party seniority. Statistics related to long-duration memberships would therefore tell a more important story, but applying measures of statistical significance to Congress must always be done with restraint. The only true measure of legislative significance is votes.

The speculation on why physician representation in Congress has dropped since 1889 is incomplete. The authors discuss workforce levels, salary, duty, time, morale, and role models, but omit power, pride, passion, idealism, ego, drive, connections, expense, and, most startlingly, the electorate and its changes over 115 years. Perhaps 20th century physicians have merely heeded Osler’s comment that “Politics has been the ruin of many country doctors” (2). Given the innumerable factors contributing to electability, one might as well explain the surprisingly large proportion of gynecologists among current physician Congressmen by citing Richard Asher’s half-serious observation that gynecologists typically wear “an expression of refinement and sympathy” (3).

The authors suggest it is advantageous to have physicians in Congress to bring health care expertise to bear on health-related issues. This is a narrow view. Among the reasons not to have physicians in office is: we are a socially homogenous and privileged group functioning in a professional environment that does not generally foster development of leadership skills.

Indeed, the greatest benefit carried by medical training would not be narrow expertise on health care, but would be skepticism and the habit of asking good questions. An exception might have been the ninth President of the United States, William Henry Harrison, who was a medical student first in Richmond then Philadelphia (under Benjamin Rush, no less) before leaving to join the Army and follow the path that would take him to the White House. He is chiefly remembered now for dying of pneumonia one month after not having the medical good sense to wear an overcoat or hat while delivering his hour and forty-minute inaugural address on a very cold Washington day (4).

To the Editor:

The perspective about Merck recalling rofecoxib (1) should not have appeared in a medical journal. Although ensconced under a “Business and Medicine” heading, it was purely a business article having nothing to do with medicine.

The authors, from Harvard Business School, use opaque business formulations such as a “cost of capital of 11.25 percent to discount future earnings” to calculate that Merck’s post-recall stock drop was excessive given the recall’s revenue and litigation impact. Their article then rehashes tired statistics about drug development expense, analyzes Merck’s business strategy, and concludes with patient-safety platitudes.

Where is the medicine? Similarly analyzing a multinational shoe company would be equally relevant to physicians: all patients need shoes, and poorly fitting shoes in diabetics cause considerable morbidity and sometimes mortality.

The Journal’s increasing preoccupation with business is classic mission creep, and incurs opportunity cost: uneven translation of research results to the bedside is a major failing of today’s medical system. High impact publications such as the Journal poorly serve our profession when they divert precious pages to Wall Street intrigues.

To the Editor:

The Lancet’s new design includes color coding for the three sections of each issue (1). While the value of such coding leaves me lukewarm, the choice of colors must be criticized.

Why did you choose to use both red and green? Approximately 6% of ethnically western European men have a diminished capacity to distinguish red from green (2). In some Scottish villages the prevalence of color perception deficiencies is as high as 25% in males and 9% in females (3) (4).

Lists of colors having high contrast with each other, and suitable for use in color deficient persons, are available (5). Alternatively, a texture could be added to color.

Color deficiency has about the same prevalence in men as left-handedness. It would be unthinkable to introduce a feature that frustrated left-handed readers, and it should be equally unthinkable to do the same for color deficient readers.

To the Editor:

Dr. Schwartz dates the first description of hemoglobinuria (as black urine) to the 13th century AD (1).

About 400 BC, however, Hippocrates described urinary quantity, color, consistency, or sediment in 41 of 42 case reports in his Book of Epidemics (2). Twelve case reports mention black urine, a frequency so high that one wonders if glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (3) and/or fava bean ingestion could have predisposed this population to hemolysis.

Inspection of the urine was important in ancient Greek medicine, but has been recently dismissed as “mostly nonsense” (4). Yet, the approach taken by Hippocrates was remarkably modern. In several patients having pigmented urine, Hippocrates checked for the appearance of a sediment after allowing the urine to sit – a maneuver that would have allowed him to distinguish hematuria from hemoglobinuria and myoglobinuria.

Such insights from Hippocrates are not surprising. As Garrison has remarked, “All that a man of genius could do for internal medicine, with no other instrument of precision than his own open mind and keen senses, he accomplished” (5).

To the Editor:

The discussion of how to manage Mrs. P, a 60 year old woman with atrial fibrillation (1), nicely reprised Sir William Osler’s 1907 advice: “Too much stress should not be laid upon arrhythmia per se in the absence of organic disease” (2).

As presented, however, Mrs. P’s evaluation did not adequately exclude organic disease: neither her body mass index nor a general description of her habitus was provided. Although her physicians obviously had access to this information, its omission from the case record suggests that an emerging correlate of atrial fibrillation, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), was not considered as a potential exacerbating factor in her illness.

The prevalence of OSA in American adults is estimated as 20%, most of it undiagnosed, and most of it related to obesity (3). Hypothyroidism and alcohol ingestion, both of which Mrs. P had, are two of several additional risk factors.

As recently reviewed in JAMA, the role of OSA in cardiac disorders is receiving increasing attention, in part because OSA “frequently coexists undiagnosed in patients with cardiovascular disease” (4). Several physiological mechanisms plausibly link OSA and atrial fibrillation (4), but few studies have examined their clinical links. Of highest relevance for Mrs. P, however, Kanagala et al (5) found that untreated sleep apnea doubles the likelihood of atrial fibrillation recurring within 12 months of cardioversion, when compared to OSA patients receiving positive pressure treatment.

The effectiveness, and, therefore, cost-effectiveness, of testing for OSA in patients with atrial fibrillation is unknown. However, given that OSA is itself common, serious, and treatable, a case can be made for testing patients such as Mrs. P for sleep apnea, especially if they are obese, before consigning them to a lifetime of perhaps unnecessary warfarin therapy. Certainly a stronger case can be made for taking a sleep history in all patients with atrial fibrillation.