Letters

I started as an agnostic. But after reading Dr. Anthony Furlan's recent defense of unproven endovascular interventions for acute stroke, I finished leaning towards Dr. Kyra Becker's non-interventionalist position (“Should we treat stroke patients with therapies that have not been shown to improve outcomes?” May/June 2009, p. 15). Dr. Furlan presents a potentially dangerous therapy with an unknown effect on outcomes. If the best defense of this therapy is popularity (70% of people use it) and that further trials are difficult, then we're in need of better. Extrapolation from PROACT II isn't good enough; we need data for what we're doing now.