The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
My wife was worried about my high cholesterol, so I finally made a doctor's appointment. I told her "the doctor is just going to plug my numbers into this calculator I found online and say I don't need statins". And that's exactly what happened, in a 15 minute encounter for which my insurance company paid $410.
Nevertheless, in my 40's, I am not entirely comfortable with a 2% risk of a coronary event in the next 10 years, so I asked about a coronary calcium scan. My doctor seemed surprised by this (being entirely reliant on the calculator), but agreed it might be a good idea.
Unsurprisingly, my insurance provider rejected the scan as medically unnecessary. But I went to a site called Instalab and was able to book one the next week for $200 + $50 to Instalab. This might have been less than my co-pay anyway.
The scan took about 2 minutes and I received the results the same day. Zero calcium build up so far!
This brings my 10 year risk down close to zero. I'll still monitor my cholesterol to make sure it doesn't spike to extreme levels, but I feel pretty comfortable not taking statins for now.
At 40 I would look at your 30 year risk. It takes decades for heart disease to develop and by the time it shows up in a calcium score, statins can only do so much to help.
Calcium scores also have a fairly difficult to disregard high false negative rate IMO.
If I were you I would push my doctor to prescribe me statins. They're low risk and practically free.
High cholesterol is very easily treated and could be hidden bad news.
(I'm not a real doctor btw)
I do find it odd that they use a 10 year calculator not a 30 year one.
Any more idea why they do that? Lack of data?
According to ChatGPT about 20-30% of people will have a non zero score by my age. Assuming that’s accurate (will need to verify) it does seem to indicate I am not at high risk. Why not just wait and monitor?
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