Thou Shalt Not Try to Outsmart Me

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD Medical researchers and their groupies – early adopters, thoughtleaders, those easily influenced or whatever you want to call them – never seem to learn that when you try to outsmart Mother Nature or Our Heavenly Father, whichever appeals more to your world view, you usually get your hand slapped. When I was a resident (1981-1984), I got penalized if I didn’t offer postmenopausal women estrogen-progesterone replacement therapy because it seemed obvious that if women with endogenous estrogen didn’t get many strokes or heart attacks and women without estrogen did, all we needed to do was make up for God’s or Mother Nature’s oversight in not keeping the estrogen coming after age 50. Then the Women’s Health Study in 2000, almost 20 years later, showed that women on Prempro had more strokes, blood clots and heart attacks, and more breast cancer on top of that, than women who accepted the natural order of things – menopause with all its symptoms and inconveniences. The same things has happened with osteoporosis – more subtrochanteric femur fractures after five years of Fosamax than in untreated women. A simple thing like hypertension has played out similarly: People who take certain third tier blood pressure medicines, like alpha blockers, don’t have the benefit of lowering blood pressure that you might expect; those medications actually increase risk of death from cardiovascular causes. The typical blood sugar targets ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Medical Practice Physicians Primary Care Hans Duvefelt Source Type: blogs