I'm sorry to hear about your friend too and hope that he makes a good recovery. A good friend of mine phoned me up about 8 years ago and told me that he had been feeling ill and had just found out that he only had 1 working kidney and that was at about 40% and on the way out. That was a real shock. Fortunately, his dad donated a kidney and they are both doing well now.
mangaman said:
I'm 44 - so the same as you Mark. I have no cardiac history in the family. I would fight off with a pointed stick any GP that tried to check my cholesterol. If it were high, the GP would have to decide on dietary advice (which rarely helps that much) or statins, which have potentially serious side effects.
Partly this is medical evidence - there is none whatsoever to show reducing your cholesterol at aged 44 with a statin will prolong your life if you haven't already had a heart attack or stroke.
Also, despite (or maybe because of) being a Doc, I don't want to know my exact risk of death or be over-screened in case I may develop a horrible disease in 5 years.
That's really interesting! My attitude to the medical profession is that less is more. If I break a leg. I'd like it repairing please but if I want to avoid a heart attack then I'll try to sort that out myself. I'll get my weight down more, will carry on eating healthy food, not smoking and doing as much cycling and walking as I can to keep fit. Hopefully, that will do the trick. I'm lucky in that most of family live well into their 80s, many into their 90s and a few have made it to over 100.
A friend of mine said that if he could afford it, he would have every medical check known to man done on him because he wanted to know if anything was wrong and try and fix it.
I have the opposite view. I would like to live a life free of stress, and if something horrible is going to happen, then I'd like to find out about it as late as possible! Obviously there are some things that are curable if caught early enough, but I'll take my chances.
I think if doctors look hard enough, they always think they have found something. The number of things that they thought that someone I know had, when it was obvious to me that obesity was the real problem. Obscure conditions that hardly anybody has ever heard of and hardly anybody ever gets. They did all the tests... Obscure condition #1 - no, that wasn't it, Obscure condition #2, nope... Don't most people who are pretty sedentary and 25% overweight have problems with mobility?
mangaman said:
I worry we are become addicted to the medical profession and forget life is to be lived. If you're not well and want to see me, I'll do my utmost to address the problem you want addressing, but I won't try to persuade you to see me if you don't want to. If the problem is not medical I will try to refer to someone else who can help.
I mainly deal with older people and spend my time stopping drugs / operations that the older people don't actually want (if you ask them and present the evidence). Most pills can be quite toxic in very old people (who are invariably excluded from drug trials on the grounds of age)
There endeth my rant - sorry. As I say purely personal. A lot of my peers would disagree.
Brilliant!
I think that NHS should be renamed the NIS (National Illness Service), have its budget gradually reduced by 50% and the other 50% phased in to a new NWS (National Wellness Service). That would be responsible for promoting wellness through good nutritition, avoidance of smoking and drugs, major reductions in alcohol abuse, promotion of healthy exercise, reduced motor vehicle usage, removal of toxic chemicals from the environment, stress-reduction strategies and so on and so forth.
(You watch, after all that I'll go and disappear from the forum in about a week's time and you will eventually hear through the grapevine that I came down with
Obscure condition #3, that the NHS caught it in time and saved my life with some miracle new therapy!)