The heart is the most important, least understood and most abused part of the human anatomy. It’s a pretty amazing piece of work though.
If you thought you were going to escape the tedium of hearing or reading about my recent “heart episode”…..no such luck. For those of you who don’t already know, I’m now the proud new owner of a new Promus Everolimus Eluting Stent situated about mid stream in my lateral artery descending (LAD) which, in theory, is giving free flow to a stream of fully oxygenated blood through a pipe that was formerly 85% blocked. This makes me a member of a fairly non-exclusive club into which about 1,250,000 members are inducted each year.
Although the membership lacks exclusivity, we all share some common characteristics (known in the trade as risk factors). More likely than not we are white males with high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol. We probably smoked for a part of our life. We may have type II diabetes and be physically less active than we should be. Almost certainly we are obese or verging on obesity as measured by body mass index (BMI). We tend to be in the twilight of our years, but not necessarily. Recognize anyone? Be honest now.
There’s good news here too. It could be worse. A fella could just kick it without ever knowing what hit him. No symptoms at all, and then whammo, the big one. Or the doc might opine that a balloon angioplasty or a stent won’t get the job done and proceed immediately to a coronary artery graft (otherwise know as a bypass) which I understand is even much less fun than having a rope run up your femoral artery. Let me digress here a moment. I was a real dud in science, never studied human anatomy, and had absolutely no interest in knowing how all the bits and pieces connected together under our skin, but I would have thought that if it were necessary to run a tube (they call it a catheter) up to your heart, they could pick a better place to start it than your crotch. First of all…..ok, enough said. The second bit of good news in all of this is that by 2012 it’s expected that this stent thing will be a global market of $7.2 billion dollars. That’s a lot of hardware. Growing at 15% per year, and even more if the pesky Japanese and Indians would get on board.
About 79 million of us, Americans that is, have some form of chronic vascular disease (CVD) including about fifteen million with coronary heart disease (CHD). About eight hundred thousand of us die from these afflictions every year. And we still keep stuffing ourselves with Oreos and triple meat with cheese Whataburgers. It’s kind of funny, well, not actually funny, but odd. About five hundred thousand of us die from cancer each year, and none of us have any real idea how to prevent it. We treat it after we discover it, but most of us don’t have the foggiest what to do to prevent it (except stop smoking). I don’t think the docs have a clue either. But with heart disease we know the answer. Don’t get fat, don’t smoke, exercise just a bit and lay off the Fritos and bean dip for chrissake.
I’ve about had it up to here with health care reform, so I’m not gonna go there, but….think of it. If we only did what we know we should, I’m gonna say we could knock out 60-70% of the eight hundred thousand deaths. I dunno what a good funeral costs today, but let’s say its five grand. That’s almost three billion saved (if I got my zeros right) before you even start on the cost of the docs, hospitals, stents, bandages and all that goes with it. I’ll betcha that from the time someone gets in serious heart trouble until they go to their greater reward, we spend on average about thirty thou. My calculator is acting up and won’t deal with number that big, but it would put a helluva dent in the health care cost curve that everyone is talking about.
I don’t know why the Obama crowd hasn’t called me, because I’ve got a killer idea that could turn this whole thing around. Here’s the program I propose. All we have to do is put out the word that anytime you’re thinking about eating a double cheese Big Mac or somesuch, let the government know, don’t eat it and put in a claim for two bucks or maybe it should be three. Voila! We put a deep dent in the obesity thing thereby saving no telling how much in the heart attacks we would avoid, and we put money in the hands of people that we know perfectly well will spend it as soon as they get it; thereby stimulating the economy and probably creating god knows how many new jobs. That’s a twofer of huge proportions. Come to think of it though, it sounds more like a Republican idea. I just need to find a Republican that want’s to reform health care and stimulate our economy. Got any ideas?
