Praise for This Book.

Steve Kaplan did what I wish every patient who walks into my office would do: he refused to let a picture of his arteries answer a question only his heart could answer. This is not a book against stents. It is a book about earning the right to decide, and about what becomes possible when a curious patient, a good physician, and honest data sit at the same table. The chapters on women’s cardiovascular risk treat it as its own subject, not a footnote, exactly the message I spend much of my public voice trying to deliver. After more than two decades in cardiology, I still learned something here.

In The Stents I Didn’t Get, Steve Kaplan transforms his complicated journey with coronary artery disease into an accessible and compelling account of what can happen when a patient questions ‘the system,’ using AI. He uncovered the reality that every patient is different and that standard diagnostic and treatment algorithms used in cardiology do not always reflect the individual sitting in front of us. Along the way, his wife’s experience exposed the critical reality that women’s cardiovascular disease remains profoundly underdiagnosed and undertreated. I would not suggest that your medical care should be guided by an independent AI investigation, but this book will educate and empower readers to ask the right questions and understand why those questions matter.

Steve’s book goes past the simple question of whether a scan looks normal. It asks what the images actually mean for the patient in front of you, and it doesn’t pretend imaging removes the uncertainty. I don’t often see a patient’s journey through advanced cardiovascular imaging described this honestly.

I work in two rooms that see the same organ and speak different languages. In one we open arteries. In the other we map circuits. Both specialties live with a truth we rarely say out loud: what we see is not always what is actually failing. Steve Kaplan learned to hold that same distinction on his own case, refusing to let a picture of his arteries settle a question that only his heart’s actual behavior could answer. Most patients only ever hear one of these languages spoken. Kaplan taught himself enough of both to know when they disagreed, and to keep asking until he understood why.

As a cardiologist and researcher, I believe one of the greatest opportunities for AI in healthcare lies in supporting both sides of the conversation. AI can support clinical decision-making, but it can also help patients better understand their condition, ask better questions, and take a more active role in their care. When an informed patient and an informed physician truly engage, that is where shared decision-making becomes meaningful. Steve Kaplan’s journey offers a compelling perspective on what this can look like in practice.

This is a very valuable, impressively well-researched book. Steve Kaplan takes readers through a genuine deep dive into the pathophysiology of coronary disease and the therapies now available to treat it, material that is both credible and remarkably understandable for a lay audience. I've spent much of my career in cardiovascular medicine thinking about the ethics of intervention, not just whether a device or procedure can help, but what is best for true long-term benefit. Steve applies that same rigor and discipline to his own medical journey. It's a rare and valuable thing: a patient who did the ethical reasoning most of us wish every physician would embrace, and every patient could do.

I put stents in for a living, and I still think every cardiologist should read this book. Steve Kaplan didn't reject the cath lab, he did the work most patients never do: he separated anatomy from physiology, chased down the functional data, and walked into every consult prepared enough to change the conversation. The real story here isn't one man's decision to decline a procedure; it's a repeatable process showing what AI, advanced imaging, and an engaged clinician can accomplish together that none of them can alone. Stents save lives in the right patient. This book is about doing the work to find out whether you're that patient before anyone opens the tray.

The future of cardiovascular care has always depended on the marriage of engineering and medicine, better tools, better data, better decisions. This book applies that same principle to the patient's side of the table, showing what happens when a person combines rigorous data, imaging, and AI-assisted reasoning to genuinely understand his own disease. A thoughtful case for where the democratization of data, knowledge and intelligence for personalized decision process is here today.

I had the pleasure of reading Steve's cardiovascular journey and he is living proof of my mantra: with medical issues one has to be their own advocate. Steve did his incredible homework on imaging and cardiometabolic risk factors which ultimately led him to better understand his vascular condition and then make sane therapeutic decisions.

The first half of this book should be required reading for cardiology fellows. It captures the herd mentality I see so often in practice, what I'd call the 'oculostenotic' reflex, and the distinction between anatomy and physiology that gets lost in it. The second half speaks directly to patients navigating that same terrain.

When the answers don’t agree, who do you trust? A diagnosis of coronary stenosis should bring clarity. Instead, for one patient, it opens a maze of conflicting tests, interpretations, and expert opinions. One examination suggests a significant narrowing. Another appears reassuring. A functional test tells a different story from an anatomical scan. A cardiologist recommends intervention; another advises watchful waiting. A specialist focused on coronary imaging sees the problem one way, while an interventional cardiologist, a preventive cardiologist, or a cardiac surgeon approaches it from an entirely different perspective. None of them is necessarily wrong. Each is looking at coronary artery disease through the lens of their own expertise. Caught between contradictory results and increasingly complex advice, the patient realizes that the hardest part is not undergoing the tests—it is understanding what they actually mean, how they fit together, and which uncertainties truly matter. So he turns to an unexpected resource: artificial intelligence. Using AI not as a substitute for his doctors, but as a tool for research, clarification, comparison, and critical thinking, he begins to reconstruct the puzzle. He learns how coronary stenosis is measured, why different tests can disagree, what specialists are really evaluating, and how anatomy, blood flow, symptoms, risk factors, and personal preferences should come together in a treatment decision. What begins as a personal struggle with coronary artery disease becomes an exploration of a much larger question: In an age of increasingly sophisticated medicine, how can a patient make sense of conflicting evidence and become an informed participant in decisions about his own heart? Part medical detective story, part patient memoir, and part guide to navigating modern cardiovascular care, this book offers an intimate look at the uncertainty behind seemingly straightforward diagnoses—and at the emerging role AI may play in helping patients understand the medicine that determines their future.

Most of cardiology happens downstream of decisions patients never fully understood. Steve Kaplan refused to stay downstream, he used AI to make sense of his own heart data, arriving at our conversations informed, evidence-minded, and ready to ask the questions that matter. This is what it looks like when a patient becomes a real partner in his own care. More patients like him would change how it is practiced.

AI cannot be dismissed. It's used across all sectors of life, and in medicine, it's used by patients and doctors alike. This is neither good nor bad, but it instead highlights the need to use critical thinking to sift through what AI outputs tell you. In both spheres of my life, as a practicing cardiologist and as a health-tech founder, I witness AI used in place of critical thinking. Steve's journey, catalogued in this book, provides a framework for how to use AI in life and in medicine. Steve provides a rare example of 'doing your own research' and doing it well, with AI as the initial guide to understand the jargon of a foreign world. When the jargon was mastered, he took over as the guide, showcasing what's possible when data, imaging, and genuine curiosity are pointed at your own health. Ultimately, he proved that not every nail needs a hammer and saved himself from unnecessary procedures.

Steve Kaplan has written a deeply personal and unusually rigorous account of navigating complex coronary disease. Through conflicting expert opinions, advanced imaging, coronary physiology, and the responsible use of AI, he asks the question at the heart of interventional cardiology: not simply whether a lesion can be treated, but whether treating it will truly benefit the patient. This is not an argument against intervention, but a compelling case for better questions, better evidence, and better decisions made together.

The best medical decisions are not simply made for patients, they are made with them. Steve Kaplan's story is a powerful example of what can happen when an informed patient understands his disease, weighs the alternatives, and takes an active role in choosing his path forward. Faced with severe coronary artery disease and an apparently straightforward recommendation for stenting, he chose instead to pursue aggressive lifestyle modification with extraordinary commitment. The Stents I Didn't Get is an important reminder that shared decision-making is not about rejecting medical advice; it is about ensuring that even the seemingly obvious decision reflects the evidence, the alternatives, and the values of the person whose life will be affected.

Every research career teaches one enduring truth: even the most significant statistic rarely tells the complete story. Steve Kaplan learned this firsthand as a patient, not as a scientist, and had the perseverance to keep asking questions well after most would have stopped. This book offers an inside view of that persistence.

This thoughtful and engaging book highlights one of the defining challenges of modern medicine: transforming complex scientific evidence into informed, patient-centered decisions. Steve Kaplan's journey demonstrates how curiosity, critical thinking, and responsible use of artificial intelligence can enrich, not replace, the physician-patient relationship. An important contribution to the conversation on shared decision-making in cardiovascular care.

Expertise in medicine has always been siloed and hard to scale, and even when patients find it, understanding the tradeoffs behind their own care remains difficult to access. Steve Kaplan's book is a compelling window into what changes when, either through force of will or AI, that access barrier comes down. He doesn't look for a single answer; he builds a map, testing and integrating evidence across disciplines in a way that our current healthcare system has struggled to do. It's a genuinely useful model for what patient-centered healthcare could start to look like.

Sobering, yet inspiring. Bold, but not reckless. Provocative without being hyperbolic, The Stents I Didn't Get chronicles one man's n=1 quest to rise above the Number 1 killer of people across the globe. And although AI helped Kaplan navigate the murky maze of mainstream medicine, it certainly could not write the story that only he was meant to tell.

I remember speaking to a cardiologist still in undergrad, but with medical school aspirations. He told me to stay away from cardiology as there had not been any meaningful technological advance in the last 20 years and he didn't see that changing soon. Since that time, though, we've moved to a wholly new stratosphere with the advent of TAVR, leadless pacemakers, consumer wearables, remote monitoring, and predictive AI. The pendulum has swung hard. And we, both physician and patient, have to make sense of it all. Steve's exercise here in root cause analysis speaks to the complexity of medicine today. Perhaps it also speaks to a future where access and treatment with the help of AI are far more equitable.

Periodontal disease isn't just a problem with the gums; it's a chronic inflammatory disease, and there's a well-documented association between periodontal disease and cardiovascular disease. That doesn't mean one directly causes the other, but significant infection and inflammation in the mouth shouldn't be overlooked when thinking about a patient's overall cardiovascular risk. Steve's case was a good example of that principle in practice: rather than pursuing an aggressive and costly course of treatment, we identified the specific problem, treated what actually needed treatment, and kept things simple and predictable. His book does a real service putting that kind of everyday clinical reasoning into a larger conversation about evidence-based, patient-centered care.

Sports science has learned to be cautious about tools that promise more precision than they can yet deliver. Steve Kaplan brings that same disciplined caution to his own cardiovascular care, using AI to sharpen clinical questions rather than replace human judgment. It is a rare and instructive example of what responsible, evidence-aware AI use in personal health can actually look like.

What makes Steve Kaplan's story compelling is the way he approaches a complex health challenge with curiosity, critical thinking, and a willingness to engage deeply with evidence. His account illustrates how data and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, may help individuals better understand their health and formulate informed questions for discussion with qualified healthcare professionals. The Stents I Didn't Get is a thought-provoking personal narrative about informed engagement, evidence, and the evolving relationship between patients, technology, and healthcare. It is ultimately one patient's experience, not a prescription for any particular medical decision or treatment strategy.

Steve's story is a powerful reminder that real progress in cardiovascular health rarely comes from a single intervention, it comes from a patient willing to pursue every avenue, ask hard questions, and put in the work. Renew Health was honored to be part of that journey.

The social media health landscape is overloaded with anecdotes, little context, even less nuance, and too much bias toward whatever 'worked' for someone. In The Stents I Didn't Get, Steve Kaplan does the opposite. The journey he shares is exactly the kind of thoughtful, nuanced, and comprehensive perspective that makes health information genuinely useful. I recommend this book to anyone navigating their own cardiovascular health challenges.