This question has a few parts. Please bear with me. From reading the literature, my understanding is that there are essentially approaches to ablating Atrial Fibrillation. One is called circumfrential Pulmonary something something and consists of laying down scar tissue around the four (?) pulmonary veins, with the assumption that most rogue electrical signals originate in the pulmonary veins. The other approach, approach Y, locates the rogue signals and then isolates them specifically - a sort of seek and destroy approach. I further understand that the Cleveland Clinic endorses the first approach, the Circumfrential Pulmonary something something. The first part of my question is: is this correct, in particular, does the Cleveland Clinic endorse the Circumfrential Pulmonary something something?
I have A-fib and was ablated earlier this year. It doesn't seem to have worked and at my follow-up I asked my doctor about this. He said that he did approach Y, and that, as far as he knew, every doctor at Cleveland Clinic did Y. I thought about this for a while and it occurred to me that while my doctor might not know what the other doctors do, his staff must also work with other doctors and must know what other doctors do and know if my doctor was, in fact, the only doctor to do approach Y. It seems unlikely that the staff wouldn't have made that fact known to him over the course of working with him. So, question two is: is this correct. Is it extremely unlikely that this is anything but a misunderstanding, Is it possible that my doctor is the only one - or one of the few - who does approach Y and doesn't know it? My last question - and the bottom line - is: how concerned should I be about all of this?