AFIB and other things.

@MrMikenIkes

I’m not worried about my AFIB. My mom lives with it and has for years. I’m lucky that mine just comes and goes.

@jst1ofknd @MrMikenIkes Just don’t take it too casually like I once did. Read my longer post below.

@MrMikenIkes While the use of a defibrillator IS to shock Vfib back to a sustainable rhythm,

Chances are if you are watching TV and they are doing the thing with the paddles and yell CLEAR the patient is in V-Fib.

MOST times on the tube they use it (incorrectly) to ‘jump start’ a STOPPED heart. Shocking a heart with NO rhythm will get you nowhere…

@mehcuda67

I like what you did there.

@mehcuda67

I feel pretty much back to normal - whatever that is.

@phendrick

My AFIB is now of a transitory nature. I don’t just flip back and forth into AFIB through the day. My AFIB typically has a physical trigger and now lasts 24 hours or less at a time.

I keep track of it and I do daily EKGs with my Kardia device. This device is linked to one of my cardiologists (on the electrical side of things) and I know he watches it as I have gotten calls from his office before.

@jst1ofknd
“My AFIB is now of a transitory nature” – well, everything in life is transitory, including life itself (just sayin’) …

“I don’t just flip back and forth into AFIB through the day.” But that was exactly what was happening to me, when it was at its worse, and could last an hour or more at a time. I would try counting, and often couldn’t even get 5 normal heartbeats in a row, without skipped or delayed, or even double, beats.

“My AFIB typically has a physical trigger…” – I never could figure an exact trigger for mine, but it did seem to be stress-related. In fact, more than once I tried to trigger an instance of it in myself by concentrating on experiencing the anxiousness that went with it, and was actually able to bring it on by doing that! (A little mind over matter?) That also suggested that doing the opposite – concentrating on calming my mental state – might help get rid of an event of the AFIB – but that only worked a small part of the time, usually when I could actually clear my mind as much as possible – almost going into a sleep state. ( I was actually considering learning how to do TM, but by time I took that idea seriously, I had already started getting relief from the sotolol Rx, so didn’t follow up.) What I found that helped more likely, was actually increasing my physical activity some, but not going overboard; maybe grabbing some free weights for arm curls, or such. It was like the activity prompted my heart into meeting the workload by increasing output, and that over-rode the bad electrical signals causing the arrhythmia. (I never did discuss this approach with my cardiologist – I didn’t want to risk another chewing out…) At any rate, there did seem to me to be evidence of some mind-body connection, almost at the level of how a person can over-ride their autonomic nervous system. (??)

“… and now lasts 24 hours or less at a time.” That statement probably would have horrified MY cardiologist, considering what he told me about the clotting risk… I’m glad yours is paying attention to you.

“I keep track of it and I do daily EKGs with my Kardia device.” I’ve been intrigued by commercials I’ve seen for those. Haven’t pulled the trigger yet, but will now further consider it. The fact that it works with basically two leads (on the finger pads) makes me wonder.
I actually bought myself an old working EKG monitor from eBay (sorta an oscilloscope), back when my troubles with this were pronounced. It produced the paper tape record. I ran out of the special paper, and haven’t used it in so long, I’m not even sure where it is now. I forget how many leads it had, but it was a lot more than two. And back then, you couldn’t find all the YouTube videos on interpreting an EKG like you can now.
I’ve been so more-or-less stable from the sotolol, I don’t even do the heart rate and blood pressure monitoring much any more, that I used to do several times a day on a dedicated basis, with one of those portable wrist monitors. (It worked really well, and matched observations at the doctor’s office pretty closely.)

This conversation has given me much to think about on my personal health again, so thanks for starting it.

Stay safe.

And, oh yeah, have a heart…

I love puns, probably more than @barney loves purple.

purple loves @barney.

@jst1ofknd @phendrick
@Barney has AFIB, too.

@Barney @jst1ofknd Well, we’re all in good company, at least.

@Barney @phendrick

This is the Kardia I currently have. I’ve also had the cheaper version as well. I would be happy to do a Zoom (or equivalent as long as it’s not Facebook) to demonstrate its use.

Edit: including the link…

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07RQW6SD5/ref=cm_sw_r_other_apa_i_EXlQEbFC82NY4

@jst1ofknd Thanks, but I really don’t need it. When it comes to tech stuff, I’m absolutely hopeless. I can barely use my smart phone. And I hate having something smarter than I am.

Besides, I am in continuous AFIB. Shocking gave me a normal rhythm for about two hours and then it was back to AFIB. So they put me on a bunch of drugs. No change to speak of. My heart has found its own strange little rhythm and is quite happy and has been this way for over seven years.

(I do get tired quite easily and the drugs have done quite a number on my kidneys, although they are getting better because they have cut back on the drugs.)

@Barney

I’ve been shocked back into rythm twice and I’ve had a Cryoablation (I think that’s spelled right).

I still occasionally go into AFIB…

@jst1ofknd You are lucky that you have a normal rhythm most of the time. I envy you.

@mike808 So many health problems are infuriatingly physical, visible, and well understood, for being untreatable. “The bones are right there. Just… fix them. I don’t know. Get a wrench or something.”

Medicine moves so slowly. Thinking about it always gives me the craziest dissonance, like standing with one foot in the 1700s and another foot on a star ship.

@InnocuousFarmer It doesn’t help that the entire incentive structure (profit for executives and shareholders) isn’t to find a cure, but a treatment, so that your health is continuously held hostage to doing whatever suffering in and damage to the rest of your life is necessary to getting your next “fix” of temporary relief. The operative word being temporary.

@mike808 I tend to think the bigger problem is cost/revenue incentives for treatments of any kind. Milking a patent is better than developing a drug, is probably better than blowing large amounts of research dollars on something you can’t patent and sell (like a procedure?) – whether cure or mitigation.

@InnocuousFarmer Ooh, that’s deep (that reply incl. where you put your feet).

@InnocuousFarmer @mike808 I think something y’all are overlooking is the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and difficulties of human subject testing.

The IRB process exists to prevent things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment from happening again. But I believe the process also makes it more difficult to get approval for potentially dangerous research on cures for conditions that are well-managed through existing highly-tested treatments.

Another factor is simply finding willing test subjects. Human subject testing is difficult enough without extra obstacles. If you have a life-threatening condition that you manage by simply taking a pill every day, are you going to be willing to stop that treatment so that researchers can try some weird, unproven stuff on you that might get you killed?

I’m not saying perverse incentives don’t exist. They do, and I am sure they are a factor. But I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.

@Limewater @mike808 That’s also my sense, as far as the pace of medical progress. Finding an ideal application of what we already know… I think that’s where incentives and bad systems are dominant.

There’s been a lot said about the focus on treatment, without much focus on prevention, about drug price increases year over year, about the high cost of development of drugs… the scarcity of attention from medical professionals who are most competent (that’s more of a human problem across industries though).

I think we’d come out a ways ahead if we just reinserted cost into the picture. Ditch health insurance, if we’re not going to try out some kind of single payer approach. If people had the ability to see what they were paying for, and what it actually cost in a market, we’d skew towards orders-of-magnitude cheaper things, in some cases, which you’d expect to free up resources to concentrate on things that were more valuable. A lot of drugs and medical devices are rent seeking for the shareholders, because people who need medical things can’t pierce through intermediation from insurance and freely buy the close-enough thing that’s 1/10 the price.

As I understand it, in the status quo, somehow we’re simultaneously squeezing patients and doctors, but also paying hugely inflated costs for standard treatments, drugs, etc…

@InnocuousFarmer The problem with ditching health insurance is that then anyone with expensive issues, if they are not well to do, won’t be able to afford treatment. Open heart surgery, cancer treatment, stroke treatment, broken pelvis treatment, etc. are all very expensive and not optional.

Things not covered by health insurance may then be ignored even if they shouldn’t be. For example when I worked in the UK the lower tier of health insurance (the one offered free, you could pay for additional coverage) they didn’t cover broken fingers or broken hands where the bones didn’t break the skin. I saw numerous people who clearly had evidence of past broken fingers and hands. Some had reduced function because of that. The free insurance didn’t cover most dental and tons of people had many missing teeth, crooked teeth - far more than here where work insurance makes dental care far more affordable for many people.

Do we really want that? Sure prices may come down a bit with no health insurance, but evidence from the UK also is an indication that this is not a good solution when it comes to things not covered by insurance. And in the UK they have price controls and care is cheaper than here. Having no health insurance will only mean the wealthy get decent health care, good luck to the rest of us.

@Kidsandliz Well, just for the sake of spitballing on the Internet…

I don’t see that “health insurance” as we have it does a lot to protect people who need expensive care in the first place – medical bankruptcy is still a thing. Meanwhile it does seem to successfully drive people to ERs instead of preventative care, and inflates costs in a way that’s maddening… where else in life, aside from taxes, does a bunch of people with guns retain the right to get back to you about what they’re going to decide you owe them?

Even your example of UK “health insurance” has people with broken fingers not receiving medical care.

Pretending like cost isn’t a part of the picture doesn’t mean that costs aren’t going to cause a lot of trouble anyways, is more my point. It’s a tough problem and the current approach reeks of wishful thinking that’s ultimately dysfunctional and bad for everybody. Politicians and media are always talking about “costs” in terms of recipients of care paying out of pocket, as though those costs aren’t in the premiums.

We still need a way to socialize healthcare to some degree – I could probably be persuaded to land anywhere on the spectrum between “all of it” and “only expensive operations”, or maybe something like “anything unaffordable”, where the insurance pool is effectively a redistribution of income. But cost has to be visible first.

@InnocuousFarmer @Kidsandliz
I agree. Income-based healthcare means no healthcare for people with no income. So people with no income (for whatever reason) don’t deserve or need healthcare?

That is another reason, because income is dominated by employment, to abolish the system of employment-based healthcare, which has its own hidden instititional disincentives. That is what single-payer and M4A are all about.

Socialism is not an ugly word. Just ask Kentucky, the largest of the welfare queen states, that recieves more taxpayer welfare than any other from the “libtard” economic powerhouse donor states on the West coast and the East coast.

@InnocuousFarmer My point with the broken fingers not getting health care was that when it isn’t affordable people don’t do it. Abolishing health insurance and making it all self pay may bring costs down but it will increase substantially the number of people who do without any kind of health care.

@InnocuousFarmer @mike808 Even medicare and SS needed incremental improvements to fix the problems when they were rolled out. We haven’t done that with ACA care, and of course the states that refused to expand medicaid only add to the problems.

@Kidsandliz I’m with you. Maybe my point would be clearer if I only referred to these companies as “health mafia”? I mean, it’s not really insurance the way we do it anyways…

@Kidsandliz I’m kidding about the mafia thing – I just get the feeling you are talking to somebody other than me.

@jst1ofknd Good, but I wish we all were.

Back in the day, sometimes I’d go to sleep while in AFIB, and wake up out of it. And it might take me a while to realize it – like when you suddenly realize you no longer have a headache.

(Occasionally it also happened in the other direction.)

@therealjrn

Ummm… AFIB sucks and several of us have it. That about right?

@phendrick