Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/980339
t m c » p u l s e | m a y 2 0 1 8 24 Acupuncture and Chinese medicine practitioners are coming to Main street! Get a free treatment session during our grand opening in early May. Visit our website to sign up! 7515 Main St #120, Houston, TX 77030 1-877-992-2848 www.acu4u.com Mattox is so well known in trauma circles that Vanity Fair magazine asked him to weigh in on what really killed Princess Diana. His conclusion: heart herniation. "In cases of extreme lateral shocks," Mattox told the magazine in October 2004, "the heart can burst through the pericardium and lodge in the left or right side of the chest. We know [from the medical report] that Diana was sitting sideways, facing the other rear passenger, so her heart would have herniated to the right. That would have stretched the left pulmonary vein so far that it tore at the point of attachment." Mattox said it was probably pericardial strangulation, rather than internal bleeding, that caused Diana's sudden cardiac arrest in the Paris tunnel. "Informing the world of the total truth puts this thing to closure," he told Vanity Fair. "We never reached it on J.F.K., but maybe now we can on Diana." Katrina, Clinton and Obama Part of Mattox's mission at Ben Taub is to keep costs affordable for patients. For example, a CT scan sets providers back about $75 in incremental cost, Mattox said. However, some private hospitals may charge what it costs to buy the machine—$2,225. At Ben Taub, Mattox said, the patient is billed $75 for a CT scan because that's what it actually costs. "Part of it is me," Mattox said. "I'm the only person on either side of my family, with maybe one exception, who ever went to college. A bunch of dirt farmers. For six years of my life we were migrant farm workers. I had no house, no tent, slept on the ground in California. … I realized if I have someone who comes in the emergency room, they may not need all of those tests and scans." Mattox estimates 60 percent of what is done in medicine today is unfounded in scientific fact and done simply because it is what has always been done. "All of the dogma of you've got to get blood pressure, start an IV…" Mattox began. "In the Texas Medical Center, 95 percent of the CT scans that we obtain do not alter decision making. They make the hospital rich, but you really don't need them. [They're] unnecessary and we are exposing people to radiation." Mattox and his wife, June, walk outside their Afton Oaks home.