Your doctor is often not as concerned about your blood pressure as you should be

In a study published in the September 24, 2012 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine and in which researchers analyzed several million doctor visits in the US, the researchers concluded that only 19.5 % of visits that involved uncontrolled high blood pressure (HBP) resulted in a change in prescription for that patient.

In other words, over 80 % of people who visit American doctors and who have uncontrolled HBP get their problem treated with adequate attention.

All of which is a strong reminder of two things: 1) you are your own best doctor meaning that no one else will worry about your health – and help you analyzed the steps you need to improve whatever’s ailing you – more than you will, and 2) if you do happen to have HBP, get it checked very regularly (if you don’t visit the doctor regularly, make sure to check it elsewhere like on those machines that so many pharmacies now have, and at the very least, be sure to have you doctor check it during your irregular office visits to him/her) and if it remains stubbornly high, make sure to ask what other measures you can take to control you BP – such as perhaps adding in another medication since you are surely doing all the necessary healthy lifestyle things to keep your BP down. 

Health care workers and flu vaccines

A report from the US CDC claims that during the 2011-2012 influenza season, over 85 % of US doctors were immunized against the flu, which is a terrific number.

For other health care workers, though, the numbers were not as good.

About 78 % of nurses got a flu shot that year, which is good but should be a lot better, I think, given that so many nurses have very close and direct exposure to very sick patients (nurses are certainly way more often at the bedside of sick people than doctors are).

And since the overall percentage of health care workers who got a flu shot was roughly 66 %, that means that flu vaccines were not taken up by a huge number of other health care workers.

In the US, everything is coloured by cost, of course, so it could be that other health care workers just didn’t want – or have the money to get a shot but given that flu shots are generally very cheap, it’s more likely that a huge number of them just didn’t feel like getting a flu shot, and that’s something that just has to change because these people are likely (dangerous?) reservoirs for flu infection for a great number of very sick people. 

I don’t know what the numbers are up here but I think the percentage are likely lower all around, and the consequence is that a great number of very sick people are getting the burden of a flu infection added to the burden of the other illnesses they are fighting, a burden that they just can’t afford.

Are the bad guys winning

I spend my entire day reading medical stories.

Well, that and sports stories; and news stories; and general interest stories; and gossip . . .

But I do read a ton of medical stories and if I were a worrier, which I am, of course (is there a living breathing Jewish boy who isn’t?), I’d be worried because the bad guys – GERMS – are not only making a comeback, but they seem to be getting the upper hand.

Thus, the medical news this week was filled with stories about a new form of SARS (very concerning because SARS was a coronavirus, and those largely untreatable mamzers spread human-to-human (yikes!), 400 new cases of West Nile virus in the US (no word on Canada), dengue fever in someone in Florida, a new deadly iteration of meningitis that has killed 4 men who had sex with other men, a new hemorrhagic fever virus just discovered in Africa, and those are just the ones that got multiple mentions.

So what’s the good news?

Well, so far that new form of SARS seems to have happened only to 2 men who caught it either from bats or camels, which is not a risk most of the rest of us will ever run, and it hasn’t yet been shown to be transmittable human-to-human, the dengue fever was probably a one-off, the threat of West Nile seems to be waning, and the authorities are all over that meningitis outbreak.

The thing is that in this era with such accelerated ability to transmit a virus around the world because of air travel, and in an era where health risks have and habits have changed so rapidly, we have to be more vigilant than ever that the bad guys don’t get the upper hand.

But so far, we seem to be.

The worrier in me – and especially the grandparent part of me - worries, though: how long will we be as lucky as we’ve been? 

News for parents of colicky kids

According to a study in the Journal of Pediatrics, the probiotic Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938 helped settle the kids better than placebo in 80 kids.

Sounds like a safe enough treatment, if that is, you can find this probiotic because this study was funded by the company that manufactures it and that company happens to be in Poland.

Why we need to be wary of changes to existing standards for driving restrictions

A study from Ontario health records which was published in today’s New England Journal of Medicine found that when doctors warned patients not to drive (because of fears the doctors had about those patients’ abilities to drive due to chronic illness) resulted in a significant drop in the number of severe MVAs (those resulting in admission to an ER) those patients were involved in.

Ergo, doctors should warn more patients about not driving.

I have a concern about this conclusion, though.

Although age by itself was but one of the factors doctors used in deciding to whom to issue those driving warnings (chronic diseases all tend to rise with age, after all), and although in this study, a significant number of warnings were also issued to younger drivers, in part, of course because the prevalence of chronic illness is rising rapidly among young people largely because of their sedentary lifestyles, poor diets, and excess weights, I am still certain that if this study results in changed guidelines about driving limits, because so many doctors – and the health care system in general - have an underlying ageist bias (doctors are younger, often much, much younger than their patients, after all, so it’s understandable that so many doctors simply can’t put themselves in their patients’ shoes),  these new warnings will be issued disproportionately to older drivers, and limiting someone’s capacity to drive, whether that limit is self-imposed or not, can dramatically impact someone’s life negatively.