Did you ever notice that whenever a new study regarding health and medical care contradicts conventional wisdom, the new information is generally criticized? Makes you wonder what they will be saying about our health care a hundred years from now. It seems that for every study with one result there is another showing the opposite. How do we know we are actually receiving the best and appropriate health care?
Recently my wife had cataract surgery. As I am prone to do I ask a lot of questions. I asked a nurse how many of these procedures they handled each day. She said one doctor does twenty-two such surgeries in one day.
How was that possible I thought, just do he math. Later I asked another eye doctor if the story could be true. Yes, he said, this doctor is there until seven at night. He also said they set up two operating rooms for the doctor so he can just keep going from one to another. And then he explained that to do this so quickly the doctor placed each patient in a deep anesthesia, far deeper than would be typical for the procedure, and more risky for the patient especially for those in their 80s and 90s. In fact, he said some anesthesiologist wouldn’t work with the doctor. What do you want to bet each of his patients believe he is a great doctor?
The volume of conflicting information, the immense difficulty in defining quality and the propensity for patients to have unquestioning faith in their doctor are the most critical issues facing the health care system, affecting not only quality, but cost as well.
Hey, conventional wisdom bled George Washington to death and as a kid I was basted in baby oil and iodine to “protect” me from the sun. Have you noticed the flood of advertising promoting use of testosterone 😯😯😯 and the equal amount trying to get men to sue because of complications from taking testosterone medication?
Beware! Your average daily salt intake as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US may actually be low – leading to harmful health outcomes.
Beware! Your average daily salt intake as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US may actually be low – leading to harmful health outcomes.
A study finds evidence that the average daily sodium intake of most Americans is actually associated with better health outcomes than intake levels currently recommended by the CDC and major health departments.
“The study confirms that 2,645-4,945 mg of sodium per day actually results in more favourable health outcomes than the CDC’s current recommendation of less than 2,300mg/day for healthy individuals under 50-years old, and less than 1,500 mg/day for most over 50 years,” explained lead author Niels Graudal.
This study was a combined analysis of 25 individual studies which measured results from over 274,683 individuals.
The results are an important extension of the findings of a major 2013 Institute of Medicine report that cast doubt on the current CDC recommendations but failed to establish any specific optimum range of intake.
“Our results are in line with the IOM’s concern that lower levels could produce harm and they provide a concrete basis for revising the recommended range in the best interest of public health,” Graudal, a researcher at University of Copenhagen Hospital in Denmark, commented.
According to him, the good news is that around 95 percent of the global population already consumes within the range we have found to generate the least instances of mortality and cardiovascular disease.
When consumption deviated from the 2,645 – 4,945 mg range, mortality increased, so that both excessively high and low consumption of sodium were associated with reduced survival, the study found.
The study, published in the American Journal of Hypertension, also found that there is little-to-no variation in health outcomes between individuals as long as their consumption remained within the ideal intake range (2,645-4,945 mg/day).
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 