Hits & Misses – 2008/11/18
Should healthy people take drugs? Half of heart attacks and strokes occur in people without high cholesterol. Several million of these potential victims could benefit from taking cholesterol-lowering drugs anyway. [link]
Should 80-year-olds get heart surgery? The study “followed 1,062 octogenarians who had heart bypass surgery….Their average survival was roughly six years, almost the same as for similarly aged people who do not have heart disease.” [link]
What if you had to buy groceries this way? The new payment system will have 45 different codes for treating a sprained ankle. There will be 1,170 for angioplasty.
Forgetting can be useful. “Forgetting is crucial to the efficient functioning of the mind, to learning, adapting and recalling more significant things.”
Obesity Update. Huntington, West Virginia is America’s fattest city. It also leads the country in illness measures, including diabetes and heart disease. “Doughnut shops, pizza joints and hot dog places abound. The city hosts a hot dog festival every summer.”
On healthy people taking statins, the case for caution appears in a Tara Parker-Pope column in yesterday’s (Tuesday’s) New York Times.
John, what you neglected to say about Huntington (but what the article made clear) is that none of the people there plan to change their behavior.
They are going to keep on eating their hot dogs and spending Madicare money, paid for by taxes confiscated from all the rest of us.
If we bought groceries this way, there would be 1,000 different prices for heads of lettuce. It would take several hours of comparison shopping just to buy one.
Yes. Eighty-year-olds should get heart surgery. But it should not be paid for by taxpayers (i.e., Medicare). They should have to pay for it out-of- pocket or privately insure for it.