The standard medical care during a heart attack is to give a beta blocker. Beta blockers essentially act on smooth muscle (the involuntary muscles) and cardiac muscle. In the heart, the effect is to decrease heart rate and dilate blood vessels. So, in theory, this makes great sense to give someone having a heart attack so it can hopefully restore a normal rhythm and get some much needed oxygen to the muscle.
Wrong.
What? Yes, you read me right. Apparently, some studies have shown that beta blockers do nothing to decrease mortality rates and may, in fact, increase heart failure.
The thrust of the article I’ve linked to basically asserts that even though this makes sense but doesn’t work in practice, medical doctors still continue to use this form of treatment to someone having a heart attack, even though it may do more harm then good. ‘Ideology trumps evidence,’ the author, Dr. David Newman, MD, says. Basically, your doctor may be stubborn.
And I’m just going to copy these points he makes because it’s just right up my alley.
- Recent press reports detailing the dangers of cough syrup for children have noted that cough syrup doesn’t work. True: No cough remedies have ever been proven better than a placebo, either for adults or children. Yet their use is common.
- Patients with ear infections are more likely to be harmed by antibiotics than helped. While the pills may cause a small decrease in symptoms (for which ear drops work better), the infections typically recede within days regardless of treatment. The same is true for bronchitis, sinusitis, and sore throats. Unnecessary antibiotics are still given to more than one in seven Americans each year for these conditions alone, at a cost of more than $2 billion and tens of thousands of serious adverse medication effects requiring treatment.
- Back surgeries to relieve pain are, in the majority of cases, no better than nonsurgical treatment. Yet doctors perform 600,000 of these surgeries each year, at a cost of over $20 billion.
- More than a half million Americans per year undergo arthroscopic surgery to correct osteoarthritis of the knee, at a cost of $3 billion. Despite this, studies show the surgery to be no better than sham knee surgery, in which surgeons “pretend” to do surgery while the patient is under light anesthesia. It is also no better than much cheaper, and much less invasive, physical therapy.
This shows that with some minor illnesses, time and rest may be the thing needed to heal and let our immune system do its job. We are perfect, if you think about it. Our body is a very smart, finely honed machine. It is smarter than any drug we could ever put in our body. And this isn’t to say some people don’t need certain types of medication to manage some illnesses, because some certainly do. I just find that we give up to easy and rely on the magenta pill of the week to make us feel better.
Yes, aspirin can take your pain away. Well, it masks it. The cause, however, is still there. I have to explain this to patients all the time. If the oil light goes on in your car, do you take it to your dealership to get your oil changed or do you spray paint over the light and drive the engine to the ground? Most people take their car to the dealership.
I digress. The point is even your medical doctor may be clinging to a treatment that doesn’t work (or may actually make things worse). Therefore, it’s always a good idea to question the procedures your doctor (whatever type they may be) is doing. Yes, you may come across as a pain (I know I do), but in the end, it’s your body, not theirs.
