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There's a comment like this for every article. Maybe someday al-Qaeda terrorists will genetically engineer a plague virus that turns everybody into "28 Days La

There's a comment like this for every article. Maybe someday al-Qaeda terrorists will genetically engineer a plague virus that turns everybody into "28 Days Later"-style zombies. Somebody will be here saying, "breaking news - Islamists don't like us." This is actually a little more significant than finding some side effects. It means that the daily aspirin they've been telling us to take for decades may actually be worse than useless.

shpxnvz 17y ago
Which "they" are you referring to who has been telling you for decades to take aspirin? The drug companies, the media, or your own doctor? The only one of those three that I would actually listen to, my personal physician, has never once suggested that I take aspirin daily, surely because I'm not a high risk for heart disease or stroke. I'm curious if it really is common for physicians to blindly prescribe aspirin. The article itself doesn't specifically identify any case where a patient was prescribed daily aspirin. It sounds like the people mentioned decided on their own to start taking it.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  I actually looked this up earlier, and here's the summary: In 2002, guidelines from some government agency said that people whose risk of heart disease outweighed their risk of bleeds should take it. Essentially this meant most men over 40. At the time, there was no evidence that daily aspirin decreased total mortality. In 2009, they revised it to exclude a lot more people because of the risk of bleeds. Now maybe they'll exclude even more people. I'm not going to dig the sources up again, but that's what I found. I don't know how long they've been telling people to take it, but I know my dad was taking it in the 80s. His risk factors were being a man in his 40s and mild hypertension. This fits in with a pattern in which doctors jump to conclusions and tell everybody to do something which turns out to be useless or harmful based on scanty evidence.

shpxnvz 17y ago

Which "they" are you referring to who has been telling you for decades to take aspirin? The drug companies, the media, or your own doctor? The only one of those three that I would actually listen to, my personal physician, has never once suggested that I take aspirin daily, surely because I'm not a high risk for heart disease or stroke. I'm curious if it really is common for physicians to blindly prescribe aspirin. The article itself doesn't specifically identify any case where a patient was prescribed daily aspirin. It sounds like the people mentioned decided on their own to start taking it.

rsheridan6 17y ago
I actually looked this up earlier, and here's the summary: In 2002, guidelines from some government agency said that people whose risk of heart disease outweighed their risk of bleeds should take it. Essentially this meant most men over 40. At the time, there was no evidence that daily aspirin decreased total mortality. In 2009, they revised it to exclude a lot more people because of the risk of bleeds. Now maybe they'll exclude even more people. I'm not going to dig the sources up again, but that's what I found. I don't know how long they've been telling people to take it, but I know my dad was taking it in the 80s. His risk factors were being a man in his 40s and mild hypertension. This fits in with a pattern in which doctors jump to conclusions and tell everybody to do something which turns out to be useless or harmful based on scanty evidence.