Health and longevity / Chapter 16
Scope: overall mortality and money. After a chronic diagnosis you often still have decades ahead; this section is about how to manage those decades.
People who take the medicine for the full course, as the doctor said, have about half the chance of dying over the same period as people who take it on and off. Discount this figure. …
Hypertension, diabetes, outpatient chemo or radiotherapy for a malignant tumor, dialysis for uremia, and anti-rejection treatment after an organ transplant: for these, outpatient care away from home can in most cases be paid directly by insurance. …
Chronic disease is about change over a stretch of time, not a single reading. Measuring blood pressure at home alone does not show the pressure coming down because of that. …
For a cancer that could otherwise be treated, people who use only alternative therapy and skip standard treatment have 2.5 times the risk of death of people on standard treatment. …
If the illness is stable and the drugs have not been changed, a community health service center can prescribe at most 12 weeks of medicine at a single visit. …
The basic service package is paid by yibao (医保) as required. Personalized service packages are entirely self-paid. …
When diabetes has damaged the back of the eye or the feet, there is almost no feeling until vision is gone or the foot starts to break down. Caught early, it can still be treated. …
Among people who grew a first calcium stone and no cause was found, about a quarter grow another within 5 years if they do nothing. …
If tophi have grown, bone has been eaten out, or flares come 2 or more times a year, take a urate-lowering drug long term and hold urate under 360 µmol/L. …
For people who have had gout, when purine intake over the pair of days before was at its highest, the chance of a flare was nearly 5 times the chance when intake was lowest, and the same held while taking a urate-lowering drug. …
People who carry hepatitis B virus, checked every half year with ultrasound and alpha-fetoprotein, had nearly 40% fewer deaths from liver cancer in a Shanghai trial. The more virus in the blood, the more liver cancer later. …
Among people who use an inhaler, only about 30% get the technique fully right, and some errors keep the drug from reaching the lungs. …
Among adults in China who have chronic kidney disease, only about a tenth know they have it. A yearly urine and blood test in people with diabetes can find it earlier. …
After surgery and chemotherapy for colon cancer, people who joined a supervised exercise program for 3 years had about a 28% lower chance of recurrence, a new cancer, or death, and about a 37% lower chance of death. …
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