The Stitch That Doesn't Save You

Two respected doctors in Nagpur died within little more than a year of each other. One was a radiologist, the other a neurosurgeon. Both were young, at the height of their careers, well known across the city.

The radiologist was tall, soft-spoken, and loved by everyone who knew him. He went in for a routine CT coronary angiogram — a precaution, nothing more. On the table, he suffered a severe reaction to the contrast dye, collapsed, and could not be revived. He died in October 2024.

The neurosurgeon died on the eve of the New Year, 2026, in the early hours, with no warning at all. He was known for his skill in surgery and for putting frightened patients at ease. An ECG taken three days earlier had come back normal. He worked eighteen-hour days. He did not smoke. He was not overweight. He had no history of high blood pressure or diabetes.

The medical community panicked.

Within days, a quiet stampede began. Hundreds of doctors across Nagpur and Vidarbha — healthy, without a single symptom, running up and down hospital corridors every day — rushed to have their own hearts scanned. They wanted to know if their arteries were blocked. They wanted certainty.

Many found blockages. Dozens walked out of cath labs with metal stents fixed permanently inside their hearts. They felt relieved. They believed they had cheated death.

They were wrong.

The illusion of “a stitch in time”

We are taught from childhood that prevention beats cure. It sounds sensible: find the rust in the pipe early, clean it out, and the pipe will not burst.

But the body is not a pipe.

When a routine CT scan finds a 70% blockage in a healthy person’s artery, it is usually old — a stable, calcified scar built up over years. The body has already grown small vessels around it to carry blood the other way.

The fatal heart attack rarely happens at that old blockage. It happens when a small, soft plaque — blocking perhaps 20% of the artery, invisible on any scan — suddenly ruptures. A clot forms within seconds and cuts off the blood supply.

A treadmill test cannot see that small plaque. A CT angiogram cannot say if or when it will rupture. An echocardiogram tells you nothing about it at all.

When a cardiologist places a stent in a stable 70% blockage, he fixes what a picture shows, not what will kill the patient. Decades of careful trials say the same thing, again and again: in people without symptoms, stenting a stable blockage does not prevent heart attacks. It does not add a single day to anyone’s life.

Turning the healthy into patients

So why does a well-known heart surgeon in Bengaluru insist, on social media, that every Indian should have a heart scan at twenty-five — symptoms or not, risk factors or not? By “heart scan” he means a coronary CT angiogram.

Because fear sells better than almost anything else in medicine today.

The arithmetic is simple. A healthy person is made afraid. Fear leads to a scan. The scan finds something incidental. The incidental finding turns a healthy person into a patient for life.

Give a sensitive enough scan to anyone healthy, and it will find something — it always does. The doctor grows anxious, the family panics, and the bill grows longer. In a single afternoon, a well person becomes a lifelong patient.

When we were medical students at Government Medical College, Nagpur, in the 1970s, a board outside Moonlight Studio in Sitabuldi, the heart of the city, read: “If you are beautiful, we will catch your beauty. If you are not, we shall make you beautiful.” Replace “beautiful” with “sick,” and you have a fair description of the medicine many of us practise now.

The patient leaves with a prescription for three pills, a follow-up test booked every three months, and a permanent shadow of worry over what was, until that morning, an ordinary life.

And for what? A theoretical risk, decades away, is traded for a real danger today — the risk of the test itself. Our radiologist colleague’s death is proof of that.

The fish oil myth

For years we were told to eat fatty fish or swallow fish oil capsules to protect the heart. Large trials, involving tens of thousands of people, have since shown that these supplements do not reliably prevent death from heart disease. Some trials found they raise the risk of an irregular heartbeat, atrial fibrillation. The magic pill does not exist.

What actually saves lives

The oncologist Vinay Prasad has spent years attacking medicine built on anecdote, fear, and myth rather than evidence. On 13 July 2026, days after another well-known death sent people searching online for something to do about it, he wrote about this very pattern. His point was simple: whenever someone well known dies, the same advice appears within hours — get a coronary calcium scan, get an echo, see your doctor more often, eat more fatty fish. None of it, he wrote, has ever been shown to prevent a heart attack, a stroke, or an early death. These are myths. But they sound reasonable, they feed on fear, and people cling to them — each one hoping, quietly, not to be the next name on the list.

The things that actually keep a person out of an early grave are boring, cheap, and impossible to sell.

There is no fortune in telling people the truth, but here it is:

• Give up cigarettes. Nothing else damages an artery as fast.
• Buy a cheap digital blood pressure monitor. High blood pressure kills silently. If yours is high, treat it — with plain pills that cost a few rupees each. This alone prevents strokes and heart attacks.
• Watch your blood sugar.
• Sleep well.
• Eat real food, not food from a packet.
• Walk for forty-five minutes a day.

No hospital will put up a billboard urging you to walk in the park and eat less sugar. A walk in the park pays for no cath lab, no corporate tower.

But if you feel well, walking past the diagnostic centre without stepping inside may be the best medicine for your heart that money cannot buy.