“Know Your Numbers” campaigns can serve a useful purpose.
But they can also be guilty of non-evidence-based fear-mongering. They can fuel obsessions with numbers that fully-informed people might just as soon not know anything about. There can be harm living our lives worrying about numbers, test results – making ourselves sick when we are, in fact, healthy.
Here’s a screenshot of just a tiny part of a Google search result of “Know Your Numbers” campaigns. The list goes on and on and on.
The most recent that I saw was in the January 2014 edition of Prevention magazine. It’s entitled, “Know Your Numbers: The 5 Health Stats You Should Know.”
While we acknowledge the prestige of the Cleveland Clinic and its chief wellness officer, we point out that there is a lot of debate in medical science circles about what is laid out in this Prevention magazine piece. For example:
“There is strong evidence to support treating hypertensive persons aged 60 years or older to a BP goal of less than 150/90 mm Hg and hypertensive persons 30 through 59 years of age to a diastolic goal of less than 90 mm Hg; however, there is insufficient evidence in hypertensive persons younger than 60 years for a systolic goal, or in those younger than 30 years for a diastolic goal, so the panel recommends a BP of less than 140/90 mm Hg for those groups based on expert opinion”
So if 140/90 is where this group starts thinking about treatment, and if even the American Heart Association says normal is “less than 120/80,” what we have with an announcement that 115/75 is “ideal” is mission creep, medicalizing normal blood pressure, or disease-mongering. Where does this “ideal” come from? It may only be a few points of difference, but with a few points, thousands of Americans suddenly become “less than ideal”…or, as we often call them, patients. One minute they’re healthy. And then – voila – with a prestigious organization’s spokesman proclaiming a new “ideal” – they’re sick, abnormal, patients.
Please note that almost exactly 2 years ago we wrote, “Cleveland Clinic’s Top 5 Tests for 2012 clash with many guidelines.” C-reactive protein was on that list as well.
And you may be interested in some of my past articles about “Know Your Numbers” campaigns:
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Comments (4)
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Laurence Alter
January 13, 2014 at 10:00 amDear Gary & Staff:
1. “Live by the numbers; die by the numbers”
2. “The facts speak for themselves”
Live by the first expression or idiom; die by the second one.
Fine physicians give subtlety and nuance behind “the numbers.”
Laurence Alter
Gwyneth Olwyn
January 14, 2014 at 10:50 pmDear Gary By Himself:
1. Live by the numbers, die anyway.
2. Unequivocally one death per person.
There is no subtlety or nuance to be had for fine physicians in an era of standard of care and fear of litigation from failing to screen aggressively for potential disease.
Therefore a person needs to know ahead of getting his or her numbers checked whether he or she is ready to inadvertently become a patient based on numbers and that the treatments to change those numbers may have little to no evidence to support them.
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