Giving out nicotine gum , would decimate the drugs industry, but likely resolve a lot of our chronic health and depression issues.
If you can get time off work and have a PPO, you can get the preventative care.
However, many people suffer from heart failure which, despite the name, means partial heart failure. The permanent breathlessness gives them a terrible quality of life. They can live with this for decades sometimes but it's not much fun.
You say that as if stroke is orthogonal to heart disease. Much of what prevents one prevents the other.
He got up to make a sandwich for my mother in law, who was very sick, and don’t come back. Massive heart attack and aortic rupture - he was dead before he hit the ground.
My dad had a lot of stress over his career and his share of health issues but found a happy medium and improved his health greatly stating about in his late 40s. He was basically walk/running 2-5 miles a day for several years after retirement. He had a major stroke, recovered somewhat, and then ended up almost dying from a kidney stone and resulting infection. (He could not communicate pain as part of his aphasia.) long story short, he suffered in a lot of ways (pain, disability, loss of dignity) for 4 years before finally succumbing.
In online discussions, we tend to boil everything down to death. Reality is that longer you can put off complications, the better you will be when something more severe happens or you get sick. As you age, each time something happens, your recovery is a little less robust. Go to the doctor, take your statins and take care of yourself.
That's not totally off, but the thing about cardiovascular disease is it affects everything because it's how your body distributes oxygen. Stop distributing oxygen and you die.
That's not to say other organs aren't important, it's just that if you replace "cardiovascular" with "oxygen distribution" it becomes apparent that almost by necessity it's going to include a lot of deaths.
Telling people what to do rarely fixes anything. People need dozens of impressions for those changes to sink in. Friends, family, social outings, commercials, movies, songs all promoting overindulgence won’t be overcome with a helpful pamphlet or nagging.
One person may run an intense soup kitchen 15 hours a day and feel little stress, and another can sit at a computer for 9 hours sending pointless emails and feel tremendous stress.
How exactly stress corresponds to biomarkers doesn’t matter if your desire is to lower it.
The issue is that many of us don’t pay attention to how we keep our body & mind throughout the day, or do so on a very superficial level. So strain on the body can accumulate for a long time.
“Stress management” is a lifetime skill. It doesn’t come in bulletpoints, it’s as broad as “living happily”.
Edit: That said, this can make the advice “be less stressed” a bit vacuous.
But people do get scared when random health issues flare up and become more conscious of how they deal with stress in life.
So it’s not bad to keep reminding people either :)
“Try not to stress” or “reduce stress” – but how to do that? Stress itself is nebulous, and the countermeasures are inconclusive.
Think of the last time you were angry or frustrated. Did your spouse telling you to “calm down” fix the problem?
More specifically, it’s “change your diet and eat/drink less”, which is the hardest part. Diet’s impact eclipses regular activity, and it’s consequences build up and compound over decades.
People don’t need more facts and information – those are in surplus. In fact, for most people when they receive too many facts, they just glaze over.
The changes needed are trivial
Feels like the whole thing could be shortened to just say "here's the tests you run, the drugs you might take, the lifestyle changes you should consider".
I’m located in Europe, so I may have a slightly different view, but my doctors clearly care and discuss with me about prevention, risks, tradeoffs, …
They praise the methods of the „good“ doctors and stamps the others as driven by financial gain. Who says the expensive ones are any better in this regard? Who says they are more or less exaggerating the importance of test results to make you come back?
The worst will basically laugh me out of their office for daring to belong to a marginalized identity or failing to already have the health knowledge I'm there trying to gain from them.
Maybe I have awful luck... but I have very little faith at this point. The most effective relationship I had was with a hack who was willing to just prescribe whatever I asked him for and order whatever tests I asked him for (I think most of his patient base were college students seeking amphetamine salts).
Nitpick: he mentions LDL-C but the test results don't mention that at all. Only later do I see that is "LDL Cholesterol".
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronary-heart-disease/treatme...
EDIT - I misread the comment. It’s never too late to start, just be careful for injuries as that will block your ability to exercise.
The resulting science is then reported as “When you cross 35, your chances of being pregnant immediately drop” or “The brain stops developing at 18” and so on.
Almost nothing in the body is really like this, though. You can quit smoking later in life and it will help. You can eat better later and it will help. You can exercise and it will help. Very few things are “the damage is done”.
The only constraints are that the later you start the more risks you face. E.g. if you first deadlift in your 50s and you decide to follow Starting Strength you’re going to have trouble.
I've now been on rosuvastatin and ezetimibe for several years with zero noticeable negative effects. I'm hoping that this with other behavior modification can help stave off further damage for a while.
(I think that's what the stats mean, right? I'm open to correction on this. I do believe the statin studies, I'm not a science denier. I think what I've said matches the science, as far as I understand.)
It is very difficult to have any level of confidence with the medical industry so my current approach has been to eat as healthy as possible while staying as fit as I can without undue extreme stress.
My family has a history of cardiovascular disease despite us doing what we can w.r.t eating and exercise. I’d encourage you to get some tests at least.
My mother similarly was put on statins and is getting a cardiovascular work up (calcium scan) because she now has early atherosclerosis. She eats super healthy and is a former olympic sprinter..
Bonus anecdote: In my free time I do shifts as an EMT with my fire dept (911), that is a big wake up call to wanting to be as healthy as can be. The number of patients I see who are 50+, nearly all are on 5-10+ meds, few are just one 0, 1, or 2. At that age I see type 2 diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and more.
There are two known harms from scans:
- Radiation. This is why people shouldn't get these scans several times a year, but 1-2 are very unlikely to move the needle. The average radiation from a full chest CT is just under the average dose for ~2 years of normal background radiation. (I don't know if a CTA uses less than average.)
- Acting on something you would otherwise have ignored, where ignoring it might have been the right answer. The main problem here is that it's hard to get a medical opinion saying "you should ignore this" because of perverse incentives: there's an aversion to recommending doing nothing because that could lead to a lawsuit, whereas "overtreatment" will not get a doctor sued. However, you can make a deliberate decision to do this anyway even after getting the scan; seek second and third opinions, consider alternatives, weigh risk versus reward, make a considered decision.
We are all going to die one day.
When I was younger, I would fret over this kind of article. Great, one more thing I have to worry about. Now I just mostly ignore it. It's impossible otherwise. If I dedicate hours and days and months to all the heart best practices, what about when the liver, esophagus, kidney, bladder, brain articles come out?
We all know the good practices. Don't be a dumbass. Don't drink too much, exercise and so on. Besides that, I'm very much going to be reactive, as the article cautions against. I just don't have time or mental energy to do otherwise.
In theory yes, but in practice we are all dumbasses to some extent.
I used to have your attitude until I saw a friend die of a heart attack at an early age - and it appeared to me that he would have survived if he had an indication. So, now I have changed my attitude to one of more data does not hurt.
As far as heart disease goes, yes, it's the big killer and it's time people started waking up from the media haze, but to do that, you have to admit you were wrong, and for many, that is far too tall a hill to climb.
Processed meats are so bad, they should be eliminated entirely from everyone's diet. The World Health Organization has classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen. No amount of it is considered safe.
Unprocessed read meat is still a problem and WHO advises less than 350g a week. Which is 12–18 ounces of cooked meat. 12g is about one adult serving of steak. So you really are looking at 1.5 servings per week of unprocessed red meat to be safe. At most! You probably should try for less or closer to 12g.
And really if you're at a healthy weight, then I'm not sure how helpful this is. Obesity is a bigger risk factor. This is a bit of the elephant in the room for heart health. Not only should we not be eating things associated with heart disease but also we need to keep ourselves at a healthy weight.
This can happen when we choose to treat otherwise benign issues that would have had few negative consequences for our health or longevities. Those treatments can have negative effects that are worse than the ailment we’re trying to treat.
I know it’s a natural tech-guy impulse to quantify everything and get access to as much data as you can, but that myopic focus can actually lead us to optimize for the wrong thing.
Key Takeaway: Get a CT or CTA scan, and if you can afford it go for the CTA with Cleerly.
Hang on a second.
This guy is making a big big claim.
The central point of his article is that he went to a doctor who followed the guidelines, tested him and found he wasn't at risk for heart disease.
But then he went to another, very expensive concierge doctor, who did special extra tests, and discovered that he was likely to develop heart disease and have a heart attack.
Therefore he is arguing that THE STANDARD GUIDELINES ARE WRONG AND EVEN IF YOU DO EVERYTHING RIGHT AND YOUR DOCTOR CONFIRMS IT YOU MAY BE LIKELY TO DIE OF HEART DISEASE ANYWAY, SO ONLY THE SPECIAL EXTRA TESTS CAN REVEAL THE TRUTH.
I want a second opinion from a doctor. Is this true? Is this for real? Because it smells funny.
I also disagree that the 50the percentile is the breakpoint between healthy and unhealthy. There's a lot more to deciding those ranges beside "well half of the population has better numbers"
You're not sure of whether this is a good idea or not, so you ask various physicians, and the consensus is unanimous: the very suggestion is offensive, do you think doctors are unclean?
A clear conclusion has been achieved.
Mainstream medicine is hyper optimized for the most common 80% of cases. At a glance it makes sense: optimize for the common case. Theres some flaws in this logic though - the most common 80% also conveniently overlaps heavily with the easiest 80%. If most of the problems in that 80% solve themselves, then what actual value is provided by a medical system hyper focused on solving non-problems? The real value from the medical system isnt telling people "it's probably just a flu, let's just give it a few days and see" it's providing a diagnosis for a difficult to identify condition.
So if your question is "how do we maximize value and profit in aggregate for providing medical care to large groups of people", mainstream medicine is maybe a good answer.
But if your question is "how do we provide the best care to individual patients" then mainstream medicine has significant problems.
It’s scarily common in medicine for doctors to start specializing in diagnosing certain conditions with non-traditional testing, which leads them to abnormally high diagnosis rates.
It happens in every hot topic diagnosis:
When sleep apnea was trending, a doctor in my area opened her own sleep lab that would diagnose nearly everyone who attended with apnea. Patients who were apnea negative at standard labs would go there and be diagnosed as having apnea every time. Some patients liked this because they became convinced they had apnea and frustrated that their traditional labs kept coming back negative, so they could go here and get a positive diagnosis. Every time.
In the world of Internet Lyme disease there’s a belief that a lot of people have hidden Lyme infections that don’t appear on the gold standard lab tests. Several labs have introduced “alternate” tests which come back positive for most people. You can look up doctors on the internet who will use these labs (cash pay, of course) and you’re almost guaranteed to get a positive result. If you don’t get a positive result the first time, the advice is to do it again because it might come back positive the second time. Anyone who goes to these doctors or uses this lab company is basically guaranteed a positive result.
The same thing is starting to happen with CVD risks. It’s trendy to specialize in concierge medicine where the doctor will run dozens of obscure biomarkers and then “discover” that one of them is high (potentially according to their own definition of too high). Now this doctor has saved your life in a way that normal doctors failed you, so you recommend the doctor to all of your friends and family. Instant flywheel for new clients.
I don’t know where this author’s doctor fits into this, but it’s good to be skeptical of doctors who claim to be able to find conditions that other doctors are unable to see.
When I see that it is widely accepted that ApoB is better to measure than LDL-C, but the industry continues to measure LDL-C, but not ApoB, I wonder why. It makes me skeptical.
When I see that the purpose of statins is to reduce plaque buildup in the arteries, and that we have the ability to measure these plaque buildups with scans, but the scans are rarely done, I wonder why. Like, we will see a high LDL-C number (which, again, we should be looking at ApoB instead), and so we get worried about arterial plaque, and we have the ability to directly measure arterial plaque, but we don't, and instead just prescribe a statin. We're worried about X, and have the ability to measure X, but we don't measure X, and instead just prescribe a pill based on proxy indicator Y. It makes me skeptical.
In the end statins reduce the chance of heart attack by like 30% I think. Not bad, but if you have a heart attack without statins, you probably (70%) would have had a heart attack with statins too. That's what a 30% risk reduction means, right?
As you can see, I'm worried about cholesterol and statins.
As to why medicine is like this, it's because it's conservative, usually about 17 years behind university research[0], and doctors are shackled to guidelines in most health systems or risk losing their licenses. It isn't a coincidence that the article author had his out-of-pocket concierge doctor tell him the more up-to-date stuff.
To expand, one of the coverage pillars of malpractice insurance (in the US) is the "standard of care". This is basically what most doctors and their associations consider acceptable, which by definition excludes new, better techniques.
This is both a bug and a feature. A move fast and break things philosophy would cause more harm than good, but it also prevents rapid adoption of incremental improvements.
Meta-analysis conclusion: This literature-based meta-analysis did not find evidence for the benefit of statin therapy on all-cause mortality in a high-risk primary prevention set-up.
There have been a lot of studies on statins. If a meta-analysis comes along and only cherry picks a couple of them, something is up.
Financed by who?
This is totally unsourced now but I did a deep dive quite a while ago now and it seemed to me that studies largely found that statins after a heart attack helped all cause mortality (though not by a ton), but if they were prescribed to someone before a heart attack it wasn’t nearly as clear. Considering how they often make people feel it seems like people should be a bit skeptical.
ApoB is shaping up to be an incremental improvement in measurements, but health and fitness influencers have taken the marginal improvement and turned it into a hot topic to talk about.
This happens with everything in fitness: To remain topical and relevant, you always need to be taking about the newest, most cutting edge advances. If it’s contrarian or it makes you feel more informed than your doctor, it’s a perfect topic to adopt for podcasts and social media content.
ApoB is good, but it’s not necessarily the night and day difference or some radical medical advancement that obsoletes LDL-C. For practical purposes, measuring LDL-C is good enough for most people to get a general idea of the direction of their CVD risk. The influencers like to talk about edge cases where LDL-C is low but then ApoB comes along and reveals a hidden risk, but as even this article shows there isn’t even consensus about where the risk levels are for ApoB right now. A lot of the influencers are using alternative thresholds for ApoB that come from different sources.
> In the end statins reduce the chance of heart attack by like 30% I think. Not bad, but if you have a heart attack without statins, you probably (70%) would have had a heart attack with statins too. That's what a 30% risk reduction means, right?
30% reduction in a life threatening issue is huge. I don’t see why you would want to diminish that.
If you were given the choice of two different dangerous roads where one road had a 30% lower chance of getting into a life-threatening car crash, you would probably think that the choice was obvious, not that the two roads were basically the same.
That prior discussion gives no good reasons. The linked medium posts are, to be frank, trash.
Statins are well-tolerated drugs with little to no noticeable side effects. You might have to try a few. You may need to combine ezetimibe to maintain a moderate statin dosage level, and that's it. (Like the author of this article)
Source: Leading cardiologists worldwide, and doctors of the rich and famous.
What you put into your body: no processed food, cook yourself, lots of variety of veggies and fruits, little meat, little alcohol.
What you do with your body: regular exercise, low stress, enough sleep.
What you do with your mind: good social environment, good relationships.
And an apple a day keeps the doctor away!
This is wrong. Our bodies evolved to rend flesh and eat meat. They are optimized by millions of years of evolution to process and run on meat.
The biochemical pathways of carb-heavy diets put more oxidative stress on the body.
Humans have eaten complex carbs only for the last 10k years since agricultural revolution. Before that, outside of a small part of Africa, there physically wasn't enough carbs available to say that they made any substantial amount of our diet.
Most ancenstral carbs were uber high in fiber, and very low in glucose (starch) and fructose.
Also lots of roots are edible with cooking, and it looks like we've been cooking for about a million years. Then there's wild rice, cattails, beans, berries, all sorts of stuff.
I agree that most wild plants are high in fiber and low in sugar, but there are are a lot of complex carbs to be had, if you have fire.
Actually they are not. "Practically" is carrying a lot of weight there. The factory baked cake will have a lot more extraneous ingredients and usually has a larger quantity of sugar and fat. Similar to how restaurant food generally has a lot more salt and fat than home cooked food.
The direct impact of those extra ingredients alone or in combination is not entirely clear at this point, aside from building evidence that people whose diets include more of that seem to be less healthy.
Some stuff is BIO, cream or coconut milk are lower fat version, or carrots are are without residual pesticides. Less salt since we use less salt, and taste buds quickly adjust so its still adequately salty, a better mix of herbs and spices so taste is.. simply better, more refined. We use with much less sugar, the same as for salt above (if you eat sweet stuff sparingly then even mildly sweet stuff tastes amazingly, just don't go from one extreme to another).
But that loaf you buy at the store? It'll generally be covered in mold before it gets hard, and that's quite the achievement since it also tends to be more resistant to mold as well! Bread should get hard. This is where a ton of old recipes come from. The Ancient Greeks would dip it in wine for breakfast, Euroland has bread soup/puddings, and even stuff in the US like Thanksgiving stuffings or croutons.
If you stepped inside a food factory you would see how false that statement is
> If you only read one thing here, make it the “How to not die of heart disease” section.
Which itself is still quite long but it emphasizes:
> Every lipidologist I’ve spoken with has stressed the importance of measuring and managing ApoB above all else – it’s a far better predictor of cardiovascular disease than LDL-C (which is what physicians are most familiar with). Every standard deviation increase of ApoB raises the risk of myocardial infarction by 38%. Yet because guidelines regularly lag science, the AHA still recommends LDL-C over ApoB. Test for it regularly (ideally twice a year) and work to get it as low as possible (longevity doctor Peter Attia recommends 30-40mg per deciliter). Many lipidologists will say to focus on this above all else.
And:
> I asked several leading lipidologists to stack rank what they believe are the most important biomarkers for people to measure and manage. […], and will likely cost anywhere between $80-$120 out of pocket.
That’s a pretty interesting and relevant part of TFA. Omitting that is not a fair “long story short”, but rather just “different story”.
When I started building an ECG Holter in my early 20s, I tried to get some friends to use it and kept hearing "yeah, but it’s not exactly sexy to wear that thing." That’s when it hit me how little people care about prevention until something goes wrong. We still have a huge awareness gap to close.
Also, given the preferences you expressed in your comment, you especially should want to avoid strokes, or the many side effects of heart disease, which can make you less healthy for a long time.
Why the f* not.
My in-laws are over 95. They refuse to go to an elderly home and as a result make everyone miserable, starting with themselves and inflicting infinite suffering on their children who each have a family of their own, and need to take care of them all of the time.
I don't want to do that to my own children. I don't want to not die. I don't esp. want to die but I'm not really afraid of it, it's just a normal part of life.
Preventing heart disease is probably a good thing, but if one prevents every ailment conceivable then how does this work eventually?
A permutation that's currently making the rounds in the press (even though the original research is from 20 years ago) is the "portfolio diet":
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/196970
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.123.0...
Some press mentions:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-portfolio-di...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/well/eat/health-benefits-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/the-portfolio-diet-what-it-i...
I like this list of experiments by Greg Muschen: https://x.com/gregmushen/status/1924676651268653474
> In early 2023 during a routine skin check at my dermatologist [...]
Are routine skin checks a thing?
> [...] I’ve spoken with several of the world’s leading cardiologists and lipidologists [...]
How come?
If you have a dermatologist, I would imagine so.
Is having someone you can describe as "my dermatologist" a common thing? Probably not for most people who don't have a chronic skin condition of some kind, I would think.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to establish healthy diet and lifestyle habits that are sustainable. A lot of people who jump from obsession to obsession do a great job at optimizing for something for a few years, but when their life changes they drop it completely and fall back to forgetting about it.
Fad diets are the original example of this: They work while the person is doing it, but they’re hard to maintain for years or decades. CrossFit and other exercise trends have the same problem where some people get extremely excited about fitness for a couple years before falling off completely because it’s unsustainable for them. Some people are able to continue these things for decades, but most people do it for a short while and then stop.
I’m now seeing the same pattern with biomarker obsessives: They go a few years obsessing over charts and trying things for a few months at time, but when the interest subsides or they get busy with life most of it disappears.
The most successful people over a lifetime are those who establish healthy habits that are easy to sustain: Eating well enough, reducing bad habits like frequent alcohol or fast food consumption, some light physical activity every day, and other common sense things.
The most important factor is making it something easy to comply with. The $300 biomarker panels are interesting, but most people don’t want to pay $300 every year or more to get snapshots that depend largely on what they did the past week. Some people even get into self-deceiving habits where they eat well for a week before their blood tests because the blood test itself has become the game.
Also with food and drink: place friction between the treat and yourself. The easiest example is to not have biscuits / alcohol in the house.
Bonus tip: alcohol free beer is really good these days.
For exercise your tip doesn’t help me at all. I hate audiobooks and podcasts so that would turn me off more from exercising. Also I want to concentrate on the exercise and not do it halfhearted.
What helped me was to realise how much better I feel after exercising - since then i kinda got addicted to it because I notice how much worse I feel after not doing it for a couple of days.
I agree on the friction. Just not having access to cigarettes is the best way for me to not smoke. I just don’t buy them and bumming one from someone else comes with a degree of personal shame for me that makes me avoid them (in almost all cases).
I naturally don’t like sweet stuff that much - however since I moved from EU to America (not US) it’s been really hard to avoid sugar. Y’all put that stuff into everything it’s crazy; I gotta watch out like a hawk and go to special stores. In Europe it was so much easier, there are always cheap sugar free whole foods available in every supermarket.
Personal story - I used to be super sporty, 4x gym training during work week - cardio & free weights, climbing over evenings after work, hiking/climbing/ski touring over weekends. Vacations were mostly more extreme variants of the same. Last year broke my both ankles with paragliding, one leg much worse, so took me some 8 months to be able to walk straight again, with some time in wheelchair, then crutches. All strength & stamina gone, flexibility 0, so had to rebuild from scratch and I mean deep bottom scratch from which you bounce very slowly, not some 1 month stop when things come back quicker. If all above weren't my proper passions I would have a hard time coming back to being again more active than most(sans that paragliding, took the lesson and have 2 small kids). That ankle won't ever be same but so far so good, ie managed some serious hike&via ferrata mix 2 days ago.
Interpretation: • < 2.0: Insulin sensitive • 2.0–3.9: Moderate insulin resistance risk • ≥ 4.0: High likelihood of insulin resistance
Your ratio = 5.0 → Suggests likely insulin resistance.
> I shared these results with a leading lipidologist who proclaimed: “Not sure if the lab or the primary care doc said an LDL-C of 116 mg/dL was fine but that concentration is the 50th percentile population cut point in the MESA study and should never ever be considered as normal.
> It’s also important to note that, according to a lipidologist friend, an ApoB of 96 is at a totally unacceptable 50th percentile population cutpoint from Framingham Offspring Study.
So... the exact median value is "totally unacceptable" and "should never ever be considered as normal"? I'm open to the possibility that the US population is so deeply unhealthy that this is true, but then that needs to be argued for or at least mentioned. Like, you can't say "you're exactly average in this respect" and expect your and that's terrible to be taken seriously without any followup.
Or if I'm misunderstanding what's meant by "50th percentile population cut point" then again, I think this jargon should be explained, as it's plainly not the usual meaning of "50th percentile".
If everyone did that, the whole system would grind to a halt. Doctors aren't in a rush because they enjoy so, they are because they're already overworked. 1 out of every 25 patients (their family) demanding extra attention is possible although still a burden. 21 out of every 25 is not possible.
My takeaway: if bloodwork were broader, covered more markers, there would be one less reason to have to advocate for your own health.
I find it odd that you would instead "advocate" for not being an advocate for your own health? Are we waiting for a friend to say, "Hey, you're looking a little rough."
Most doctors recommend against these and against the full body MRI one can get because they believe you’ll always find things you don’t expect and that will make you indulge in interventions that have weak support, resulting in deleterious iatrogenic effects.
I found that I had no such impulse with the data I had. But a friend of mine, supplied with evidence of a little arrhythmia went through a battery of tests and experimentation. He was in line for getting a cardiac ablation when he finally quit his job and stopped having the problem. So I get why they say that. There’s people like that.
Anyway, if you’re curious what you can get for $800 email me and I’ll post here. I’d do it proactively but I’m traveling so it will take a little work.
Clarification: Colchicine has been used by humans for over 3000 years. What's new is its use for cardiovascular disorders.
But since I have a PhD in computer science in a relevant subdomain, I can certainly judge the part where he recommends the following:
> What should you do with your test results? Throw them into ChatGPT, of course!
Do not count on anything coming out of ChatGPT for medical advice. Period.
It feels like the guy had a... mediocre GP, got scared by skin cancer diagnosis and over-corrected to most expensive path possible and since stuff was found out we have this article, roughly correct but written in a sensationalist (or freaked out) style. Some claims are outright false (like GPs not knowing heart disease is the biggest killer... really).
Wife is a doctor with overreach between public and private healthcare, and those private services also have their own motivations which aren't often straightforward help-as-much-as-possible, rather milk-as-much-as-possible with tests, scans, long term treatments and so on. Especially CT scans pour non-trivial amount of radiation on the body that on itself can cause cancer down the line.
With public healthcare you at least know primary motivation isn't cash flow but helping patients, the issue is rather overwhelmed resources with limited time per patient. It always depends on individual, as with engineering there are better and worse, yet we all somehow expect every single doctor to be 100% stellar infallible expert with 150 years of experience across all branches of medicine (absolutely impossible for any human being). Look around at your work if you are an engineer and perceive the spread of quality/seniority of each colleague. Same happens in medicine, just stakes are (much) higher.
Back when 3.5 came out I gave it some information about me when I was a teenager on a condition that (multiple) doctors totally misdiagnosed. It immediately told me three tests I should have done, two of which would have diagnosed it right away. Instead, I had to deal with extreme fatigue for over a decade until I finally did research on my own and had those same tests done.
As far as test results go, right now we’re dealing with our dog having increased thirst. She’s been on prednisone for a year, and that’s not an uncommon side effect. We brought her in to the vet and they tested her and diagnosed in as stage one kidney disease, with no mention of the prednisone. I put those results and her details into ChatGPT and it told us it could absolutely be the prednisone, and told us we could use an inhaler for what we were using the prednisone for - chronic bronchitis. Our vet never offered than option. We’ll find out in a few months if she actually has kidney disease or not, but chances are it was just the prednisone.
As a bonus, the vet before this one diagnosed her bronchitis as heart failure. They didn’t run any tests, scans, etc. Just “sorry, your dog is going to die soon.” What a fun week that was.
ChatGPT is an amazing second opinion tool. Obviously you need to ask it neutral, well formed questions.
But a great article with really great suggestions. Too bad there's not better medical care by default but good to hear that we can take control.
I think, in some ways, the trick is being able to short circuit the entire journey represented by this website in favour of some form of, “I’m 40. I should be more mindful of heart disease. I should add a 30 min walk to my mornings.” And then move on with your life.
I think many cultures, but especially American healthcare culture, foment a growing background noise of constant anxieties and stressors. Life is sufficiently complex but there’s always a peddler eager to throw you a new ball to juggle (and pay for).
unfortunately, depression cripples my motivation to do physical activity
I still do some, but it's never enough
qgin•1h ago