Doctors and trust issues
Thursday, 18 August 2011 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59Estimated Amount Of Glucose Used By An Adult Human Brain Each Day, Expressed In M&Ms: 250.*
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I'm back on the simvastatin. For the moment. Mostly to humor my mother.
I saw my doctor on Monday, and while she was very pleasant, she's also either an idiot or a liar. Or a combination of the two, I don't know. But I'm fed up with doctors.
My cholesterol is higher than it "should" be. (By the way, there's no proof that this is a bad thing. There's no direct correlation between cardiovascular problems and cholesterol in people who are otherwise healthy. I'm otherwise healthy, as far as I know. Also, I was told over ten years ago my cholesterol was too high. At that time, under two hundred was good. My cholesterol now is under two hundred.) (Also, they're now starting to think that the benefit people with cardiovascular problems are getting isn't from statins' cholesterol-lowering ability, but from its strong anti-inflammatory qualities.)
What this means is, I should be taking a statin. (There's no proof that statins lower cholesterol in women. They simply haven't done the studies; all their results come from studies done on men/done almost exclusively on men. Because, really, how different are men and women biologically? Except for having functional breasts and not having penises—oh, and having longer hair—we're pretty much identical, right?)
According to my doctor, statins are so safe, in medical school they wondered why they weren't just put in the water so everyone could benefit from them. (Because memory loss and rhabdomyolysis and myopathy and liver damage are hardly what anyone would call serious problems. And the memory loss thing can't be explained, it's all anecdotal, so it doesn't count anyway. And besides, it mostly only happens to women, which is why they aren't looking into it. [Does that sound paranoid? I mean, considering that it's only been in the last couple of years that they actually bothered to test the use of aspirin as a heart attack preventative for women. The had previously just tested it on men, then assumed it also worked the same way for women.] ) Also, my doctor was starting me out on what she called a "baby dose." She used that term several times. Twenty milligrams.
I looked this up when I got home. The lowest dose on the market is five milligrams, and even the manufacturer recommends a starting dose of ten milligrams. But twenty milligrams is a baby dose. A baby what? I wonder.
You might have noticed by now that I'm not exactly what anyone would call "compliant." So I checked around and made sure that the coating on the pills is not a time-release thing, got out my pill-cutter, and cut my twenties into four pieces. Then I stuck each piece in a gel capsule because I have a lot of them and it seemed like a good idea.
I've now taken two of them, and I'm very sick to my stomach. But so far nothing hurts, and my memory seems all right. And I'm not dead.
But I no longer trust my doctor. Twenty years ago she would have been pushing HRT for my health, because that's what the drug companies were selling. Reading Anatomy of an Epidemic has changed my life because now I understand just how much you cannot trust either drug companies or people who trust drug companies. I have to be look after myself (which is not right; someone is supposed to be looking after me!), so I have to be skeptical and vigilant, but at the same time polite and amusing and cooperative—which taxes all my people-skills and leaves me feeling like a hypocrite. It's exhausting. And with everyone in authority telling me I'm wrong, I start doubting myself, and then I have my Guildenstern arguments with myself, unable to be sure about—anything. Which is even more exhausting.
So I'm very tired, particularly of arguing with myself.
*Harper's Index
Posted simultaneously on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth
-:- -:- -:- -:-
I'm back on the simvastatin. For the moment. Mostly to humor my mother.
I saw my doctor on Monday, and while she was very pleasant, she's also either an idiot or a liar. Or a combination of the two, I don't know. But I'm fed up with doctors.
My cholesterol is higher than it "should" be. (By the way, there's no proof that this is a bad thing. There's no direct correlation between cardiovascular problems and cholesterol in people who are otherwise healthy. I'm otherwise healthy, as far as I know. Also, I was told over ten years ago my cholesterol was too high. At that time, under two hundred was good. My cholesterol now is under two hundred.) (Also, they're now starting to think that the benefit people with cardiovascular problems are getting isn't from statins' cholesterol-lowering ability, but from its strong anti-inflammatory qualities.)
What this means is, I should be taking a statin. (There's no proof that statins lower cholesterol in women. They simply haven't done the studies; all their results come from studies done on men/done almost exclusively on men. Because, really, how different are men and women biologically? Except for having functional breasts and not having penises—oh, and having longer hair—we're pretty much identical, right?)
According to my doctor, statins are so safe, in medical school they wondered why they weren't just put in the water so everyone could benefit from them. (Because memory loss and rhabdomyolysis and myopathy and liver damage are hardly what anyone would call serious problems. And the memory loss thing can't be explained, it's all anecdotal, so it doesn't count anyway. And besides, it mostly only happens to women, which is why they aren't looking into it. [Does that sound paranoid? I mean, considering that it's only been in the last couple of years that they actually bothered to test the use of aspirin as a heart attack preventative for women. The had previously just tested it on men, then assumed it also worked the same way for women.] ) Also, my doctor was starting me out on what she called a "baby dose." She used that term several times. Twenty milligrams.
I looked this up when I got home. The lowest dose on the market is five milligrams, and even the manufacturer recommends a starting dose of ten milligrams. But twenty milligrams is a baby dose. A baby what? I wonder.
You might have noticed by now that I'm not exactly what anyone would call "compliant." So I checked around and made sure that the coating on the pills is not a time-release thing, got out my pill-cutter, and cut my twenties into four pieces. Then I stuck each piece in a gel capsule because I have a lot of them and it seemed like a good idea.
I've now taken two of them, and I'm very sick to my stomach. But so far nothing hurts, and my memory seems all right. And I'm not dead.
But I no longer trust my doctor. Twenty years ago she would have been pushing HRT for my health, because that's what the drug companies were selling. Reading Anatomy of an Epidemic has changed my life because now I understand just how much you cannot trust either drug companies or people who trust drug companies. I have to be look after myself (which is not right; someone is supposed to be looking after me!), so I have to be skeptical and vigilant, but at the same time polite and amusing and cooperative—which taxes all my people-skills and leaves me feeling like a hypocrite. It's exhausting. And with everyone in authority telling me I'm wrong, I start doubting myself, and then I have my Guildenstern arguments with myself, unable to be sure about—anything. Which is even more exhausting.
So I'm very tired, particularly of arguing with myself.
*Harper's Index
Posted simultaneously on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth