On May 2, 2015, Dowd published a column in the Times about her niece Tara, who had a stroke at age 41 caused by an arterial dissection in her brain. Prior to the stroke, Tara had been a very active athlete. The first Neurologist who saw Tara told her to cut back on physical activity, but a second Neurologist, Dr. Louis R. Caplan, a Harvard Neurologist, disagreed with the first Neurologist and said that they had misinterpreted the images of her brain and vascular system. He told her to return to exercise, which she did safely. In the article, Dr. Caplan suggested that going to the emergency rooms was "dangerous" and compared ERs to "local gas stations" where you should not get your brain, a "Rolls-Royce," serviced. He suggested that one should be 'pushy' and since E.R. people have to deal with a lot of organs quickly, and they get little neurology training, you should ask for a Neurologist. He said that stroke experts "have had a hard time getting the message across to E.R. personnel that if a stroke is suspected, a vascular image must be taken as well as a brain image, because it shows up first in the vessels that supply and drain the brain". Ultimately he recommended that you should "find an academic medical center that has a specialization in stroke". These comments unleashed a firestorm of comments from emergency Medicine Physicians on social media, who thought that Caplan's comments were poorly informed and reckless, particularly sending the message not to go to the ER for symptoms of stroke, which directly contradicts recommendations from the American Heart Association to "call 9-1-1" when experiencing signs of stroke. In a related column in The Huffington Post, Dr. David Newman, an ER physician from Mount Sinai, wrote that Dr. Caplan's comments showed "poor insight" and "narrow expertise", claiming that subspecialty Medicine as a whole was expensive and often unnecessarily invasive.
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