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Notes -
Of course. I just read and wondered if some patients had an innate susceptibility to side effects while others never did. Would be interesting if so.
As a lay person, it’s always complicated looking at lists of side effects. Take a side effect of:
Very rare: stroke.
Does that mean that every time you take it, you are rolling a 1:10,000 chance of stroke. Or is it 1e-9 for a young healthy person and 1:10 for a very elderly person who’s already had one stroke? And so on.
The BNF provides a way to convert from intuitive explanations of risk to quantifiable forms. Common is like >10%. Very rare is like 1:10,000. That's not in terms of every time you take the pill, it's what you'd see in a patient who is taking the pill for prolonged periods of time.
And yes, patient demographics do change things. The elderly are particularly annoying, they'll collapse if things aren't dosed just right.
Yes, I see. I remember being very worried when I was doing the paperwork for my heart op and saw that risk of death was perhaps 1:200 to 1:100.
Then I got to the ward, looked around at my fellow patients (all over 70 and mostly very frail) and thought ohhh... And I felt better :P
I wish I understood the nature of resilience in general, really. The fact that the brain continues to work essentially as normal when doused in brain-altering chemicals like alcohol is really staggering when you think about it.
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