Four Crucial Questions To Ask Your Doctor

I am seeing an increasing number of patients who did not know they had a choice about taking a medicine or having a procedure. Why did you have that heart cath? A: My doctor said I should. Why are you on that medicine? A: My doctor prescribed it. It’s time we re-review the basic four questions you should ask your doctor. I wrote about this in April of 2015 for WebMD. Here is 2017 update: 1. What are the odds this test/medicine will benefit me? Medical decisions are like gambles. Benefit is not guaranteed. In my field, catheter ablation of supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) has a success rate approaching 99%, but the success rate for ablation of atrial fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia is much lower. Another aspect of discussing benefit is defining what is meant by benefit. Statin drugs, for instance, are quite good at lowering cholesterol levels, especially LDL, the bad cholesterol. But LDL is what we call a surrogate marker. Having a lower LDL is supposed to deliver future benefit–say a lower chance of a heart attack, stroke or death. If you don’t have heart disease, just a high cholesterol level, your future benefit of taking a statin is small. Abramson and colleagues, writing in The BMJ, estimated the average future benefit of statins in low-risk patients to be in the range of a 7 in a 1000 risk reduction of a non-fatal event over the next five years. That means that about 140 patients have to take a daily statin to prevent a heart attack or strok...
Source: Dr John M - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs