Myths about diagnoses and medications
Olga Nikolaeva, Andrey Belyakov, "Pravda.Ru"To get cured quickly, you need to get the right treatment, and to get it, you need to make the right diagnosis.
But diagnosis and treatment are hindered not only by the incompetence of some doctors or the lack of the necessary equipment, but also by persistent myths that walk through the minds of future and present patients. Let's see which ones?
So, DIAGNOSTICS:
Myth one: there is no pain, so there is no disease.
There are whole groups of diseases that, developing in the body, do not make themselves felt for a long time. Unfortunately, these include such serious diseases as cancer, HIV infection, viral hepatitis, etc. Something starts to hurt only when the disease is already started and difficult to treat. Then it turns out that increased fatigue and weakness signaled not about a fuss at work and not about a lack of vitamins, but about a serious malfunction in the body.
Even if you consider yourself an absolutely healthy person, still make it a rule once a year, for example, before a vacation (especially if you are going to a resort) to visit specialists, do an ECG and take the simplest tests (blood, urine). For women after 40, mammography and osteodensitometry, consultation with a mammologist are mandatory, for men - a visit to a urologist.
Myth two: an experienced doctor will not send to do a bunch of tests.
Indeed, an experienced doctor will not prescribe unnecessary tests and studies to the patient, but he will not do without them completely. If you have any doubts about the need for some tests, then ask this question to a doctor, perhaps another independent specialist. It happens that overdiagnosis flourishes in unscrupulous commercial clinics. But still, more often the reason for walking around the laboratories is different.
Often the same symptoms speak of completely different diseases, therefore, in order to clarify the diagnosis, and therefore the correct treatment, the doctor needs the results of tests and studies so that he does not have to be treated by trial and error. For example, cough occurs not only with colds, but also with pneumonia, cancer, heart disease and a hundred other diseases.
And abdominal pain can cause worms, bacteria, infections, appendicitis and many other diseases. In one case, it will be enough to drink a course of medications, in the other — an urgent operation is required. To find out what kind of treatment you need, the doctor will prescribe tests, possibly ultrasound, radiography, gastroscopy.
Myth three: you can go through all the diagnostics at one time.
Stories that someone came to the clinic somewhere and all his diagnoses were called to him in an hour are just talk, or it's about healers and methods that have nothing to do with medicine. Even modern research methods have their drawbacks and limitations. Ultrasound and X-rays show the condition of internal organs, but do not reveal functional disorders. There are at least a dozen blood tests alone. The biochemical one shows how the kidneys, liver, and endocrine glands work, but "does not see" the infection. Very specific studies are required to identify it.
You should not buy into wonderful promises like "diagnostics of the whole body in 40 minutes". The accuracy of such a survey is about the same as that of astrological forecasts: something will necessarily coincide, but much will remain behind the scenes. And common words are useless in medicine. Even if it turns out that the problems are with the stomach, additional research will still be needed to find out which ones.
Myth four: modern diagnostics is not wrong.
Each organism is unique, and no single study can provide absolute reliability. A lot also depends on how well the attending physician is able to handle new equipment, read the received analyzes, pictures and diagrams. For example, infectious diseases have an incubation period when a person is already infected, but the pathogen has not yet been detected in the tests. In some cases, the examination is repeated after some time, in others, the doctor still prescribes treatment, focusing not on the tests, but on the symptoms of the disease, the patient's complaints.
And now about the prescribed TREATMENT, which many citizens tend to adjust based on their own ideas about the benefits and harms of medical recommendations.
Myth one: there are dangerous and safe pills.
All medications act on the body in one way or another, and the benefits of this effect directly depend on the dose and the need for pills to be drunk. As a rule, the stronger the medicine, the more toxic it is: it helps well in solving a narrow problem, but there is a possibility that it will harm something. Even "safe" pills can lead to trouble if they are used for a long time and uncontrollably. For example, activated carbon and other sorbents with prolonged use can lead to malabsorption.
The risk of side effects increases when a person drinks medicine for a long time, without consulting a doctor, in combination with other drugs or alcohol. In addition, individual tolerance and concomitant diseases are important.
Be sure to tell your doctor if any medications have previously caused allergies or led to side effects, if you suffer from chronic liver or kidney diseases, diabetes mellitus or hypertension. The doctor will be able to compare the benefits and harms of prescribing the drug, as well as assess the risk of side effects. Antibiotics are usually prescribed together with antifungal drugs to prevent the development of candidiasis (or simply thrush).
Myth two: it is better to follow the annotation to the drug than the words of the doctor.
Of course, you need to read the instructions for the medicine, and read carefully, because it has long been noted that if a person understands how a medicine should work, then its effectiveness increases. However, the dose, the regimen of taking the drug and its duration are much better than the instructions will be selected by a doctor who focuses not on the average person without concomitant diseases, but on your individual characteristics and your experience.
Myth three: the analogues of the drug act in the same way as the prescribed drug.
If there is no prescribed drug in the pharmacy, the question arises: do I need to buy another one, under a different name, but it seems to be from the same disease? There are practically no two absolutely interchangeable drugs. Even medicines with different trade names, but the same active substance may differ in fillers, that is, what turns a grain of medicinal composition into a tablet, candle or syrup. For example, the well-known paracetamol "hides" behind two dozen different names (adol, acetaminophen, daleron, panadol, tylenol, dolomol, kalpol, paracet, prohodol, cefecon D, efferalgan, etc.). Therefore, absolutely identical, it would seem, drugs may have different side effects and individual intolerance.
Medications for the same thing can radically differ in the mechanism of action. When an allergic person is prescribed tavegil or suprastin, you can not replace them with ketotifen or intal. Although all these drugs are "anti-allergic", they "work" according to completely different schemes, and replacement will cancel the entire effect of treatment. If the doctor has prescribed one antibiotic, do not save money by taking out the one that was preserved in the home medicine cabinet from the last time. Treatment will not help if the microbes are not sensitive to it.
If the situation is hopeless and the analogue of the drug is the only treatment option, make sure that the dose of the active substance prescribed to you coincides with the one that is present in the purchased drug. Sometimes it turns out that the analogue is twice as cheap, because there is less active substance in it in the same proportion.
The fourth myth: the more expensive the medicine, the more effective it is.
Not always. The cost of the drug is affected by the "promotion" of the brand, labor costs in the manufacturing country, the number of intermediaries through which it reached the pharmacy, and many other factors. Often, the price of exactly the same medicine in different pharmacies varies by tens or even hundreds of rubles.
It happens that the drug is expensive only because it is the only one on the market with such an effect, and the manufacturer is free to set any price without competition in order to recoup production costs faster. So expensive does not mean the best, just as cheapness does not indicate inefficiency. Familiar from childhood, "zelenka" leaves no more germs in the wound than a hyped super-liquid for disinfection.
Myth five: a doctor is not needed for "familiar" pills.
If the medicine helped you once, you don't need to turn it into an axiom. To drink pills with benefit, you need the right diagnosis and the right dose. You won't run to the doctor for a prescription for analgin and no-shpu, but the safety of such drugs ends if you take them for a long time or in the maximum permissible doses. In addition, your body changes over time and what helped ten years ago can do harm today.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru10.12.2008