So it seems a hint of reality is striking those who advocate mass medication of old fogeys.
Giving ‘polypills’ containing statins, aspirin and blood-pressure-lowering drugs to everybody over 55 to help prevent heart attacks and strokes would harm a lot of people and be a “waste of money”, a health conference has heard.
Well, yes, waste of money, but also an absurd idea to start with. Not everyone over 55 will need such medication. We should only take medicines for ailments that we actually have, when we have them and not otherwise. I for one would never succumb to mass medication. I’ll take an aspirin when I have a headache and not otherwise. My blood pressure is already low and I’ll be damned if I start taking statins unless there is a clinical diagnosis that justifies taking them.
Much better would be to give those at higher risk of coronary heart disease a £60 computerised tomography (CT) scan to test whether they really did have hardened arteries, said Prof Allen Taylor.
Good lord! Common sense. Whatever next?
Advocates say the polypill is needed because only one in five heart disease patients stick to taking multiple pills daily, and the cost of distributing them separately is too high, particularly in poorer countries.
I’m sorry? What? I am not a heart disease patient, so why would I need to be taking any heart pills? Deal with the reality of those who need the pills and leave the rest of us alone. If producing a polypill for heart patents overcomes the resistance to multiple pills, then so be it, fine by me. However, the rest of us don’t need to take them because we are not actually, you know, ill.
They can shove their pills up their collective arsehole – not mine.
Of course if I put on my tin foil hat I would observe that once you get people used to taking a state provided poly pill it becomes terribly easy to just change the formula to deal with more “problems” as time goes on.
Mass social control by drugging the population is of course only ever going to happen in dystopian fiction.
Even a tin foil hat is a remedy for something, when the state makes them compulsory I will still tell them to hide it in that special dark receptacle.
A pint of Guinness is what these oldies need.
This has to be one of the most ridiculous in a long while. The blanket idea to anything – banning, cracking down, whatever, is mindless. And the way they defend it seems oh so reasonable to them. GTF out of our lives.
TT – I never took to Guinness. Too heavy for me. But, then, I never took to any beers, preferring cider. I just didn’t like the effects too much, not least, the migraines.
My Sister in law was on Statins because she has mildly elevated blood pressure. She stopped taking them because the side effects were worse than the elevated BP.