TY - JOUR T1 - Challenging doctors’ lifelong habits may be good for their patients: oxygen therapy in acute myocardial infarction JF - Heart JO - Heart SP - 176 LP - 177 DO - 10.1136/hrt.2008.153742 VL - 95 IS - 3 AU - Nicolas Danchin AU - Denis Chemla Y1 - 2009/02/01 UR - http://heart.bmj.com/content/95/3/176.abstract N2 - Medical history is filled with widely applied therapeutic habits that replicate longstanding practices based upon theories that have no true scientific background. Treatment of acute myocardial infarction has not escaped this general, though unfortunate, rule. Thus, in the past, lidocaine has been used systematically in patients with acute myocardial infarction because of its antiarrhythmic properties, until serious doubt was raised about a potentially toxic effect that might result in increased mortality.1 It is to the credit of Wijesinghe and colleagues that they have looked thoroughly at the evidence available for the clinical effects of oxygen therapy, a commonly used treatment at the acute stage of myocardial infarction (see page 198).2The first cause of surprise in their report is their observation of the extraordinary discrepancy between the high incidence of myocardial infarction, affecting millions of people each year, and the paucity of scientific data on one of its most widely used methods of treatment. Indeed, only 207 patients were included in the only two randomised controlled trials devoted … ER -