Off topic but important

I recently heard of a chap who checked himself out of an expensive private hospital, after a lengthy stay. He formed the opinion he was being subjected to a succession of expensive procedures for little medical reason. The interesting thing about that, is that the patient is a doctor. The straw that broke the camel's back may have been a $5000 bottle of pills to treat a fungal infection he contracted while in hospital, undergoing one of the procedures.

 

Interesting but doesn't do much to talk about stroke.

Want to hear about my daughters heart valve inplant?
How about a failed hip repair?

I'm sure virtually everybody has a story or a rant.

Not that I doubt the excessive cost.

 

All you can do about stroke is educate yourself about prevention, and beyond that learn the warning signs, so as to seek early treatment for yourself or those around you. One sign that doesn't get much publicity, but was told to me by a recovered stroke victim, was they had found themselves dropping things leading up to the stroke. TIA's are another warning sign.

 

And a TIA is a what?

 

My doctor said that you could try a preventative - baby asprin 1/ day.
But many people develop a reaction. Some signs were tingling lips or fingers.
I had to quit.

 

Transient Ischaemic Attack, which is a brief loss of some faculty, which may last only a few seconds, such as sudden dizziness, blurred vision, etc but clears quickly, only to recur periodically. I had an aunt who had them for probably twenty years, but she died without having it progress to a stroke of any magnitude. Might explain some of the incidents that occur with older drivers, but who show no signs afterwards of what caused them to plant their foot on the accelerator rather than the brake.

 

Garlic is supposedly effective as a way to keep blood flowing smoothly, but if in addition to anti-clotting medications, might be too much of a good thing, and increase the chance of bleeds.

 

The human body kind of seems like an automobile, a lot of medical procedures are about the same as car repair. What's an artificial heart but an old type diaphragm fuel pump, or, as they discovered not too long ago, a rotary pump works just fine, you don't actually need a heartbeat. Why not an inline filter to screen clots from the brain, like an inline fuel filter screens crap from getting into the carburetor. ?

 

The ability of the blood to clot must be retained, otherwise we die like rats fed warfarin. Most dangerous clots come form arterial plaques that break away from the artery wall, and the body reacts by forming a clot at the point where the tissue is damaged, but also potentially occluding the blood vessel. The clot need not have travelled anywhere to precipitate this crisis.

 

Well, 88% of all strokes are ischemic, 50% are thrombotic, so that leaves 38% of all strokes might could be prevented by an inline filter. Sounds like a winner to me.

Disclaimer, I am not a doctor. But I am a guy on the internet.

http://www.strokecenter.org/patients/about-stroke/ischemic-stroke/

(Well, now I see most sites say 80%, so that makes it 30%.)

(Now I see the AHA and others say 87%, so it's back to 37% possibly prevented.)

 

Even if was possible to implant filters, I doubt it would catch the problem, blood flows to the extremities and only returns via the veins after passing through the small blood vessels at the extremes of the arterial system, you would have filters upstream of every vital organ, and the filters themselves could create more clots than they catch. Heart stents can cause clots.

 

I refused a filter after a lower extremity DVT 7 years ago. Now I see that those umbrella-shaped filters are the objects of litigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_vena_cava_filter

 

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They should develop around a proven design.