Bullets: hypertension, insurance quandaries, and patient testing
Some brief bullets, all from the “blindingly-obvious” department.
- Having normal blood pressure can add years to your life. I have no idea why that was newsworthy. This has been well-known for years.
- The FDA approves various treatments, but insurers say no. Well there’s a big surprise for you. They claim that they need to see more studies and data before making a decision, but in reality it boils down to money, and nothing but.
- Doctors prefer to see their patients once a year and order tests for them. Well this is hardly surprising. The argument is that ordering tests and physicals don’t necessarily find anything wrong with a patient. I have news for you… this is just called preventative maintenance, and is meant to catch potential problems: the vast majority of the tests are likely going to show up nothing (and this is a good thing). I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this concept.
All sarcasm aside, I would like to think that some of these stories are written to educate an ignorant public, but I know that they are not. I do hope that people reading articles like the NYT hypertension one might think about having their blood pressure tested. Hypertension has no symptoms, and as a result, many people don’t know they have it. The number of people that have tested their blood pressure where I work is amazing, and sometimes they’ll ask you about their results if they’re high. It’s nice to see that most people are in the normal ranges, especially the older or heavier ones. It’s good when the ones that have a high reading come to ask you about it, because they usually go see their doctor. People know that high blood pressure is bad, but they don’t know that it is a stealthy killer.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos