Welcome to the Bank of Aspirin
Channel: York Cardiology
Date: 11/04/2021

My name is Sanjay Gupta and in my last video, I decried the over-zealous prescription of medications which may have no or limited benefit for the patient. In this video, i wanted to explore this further with respect to Aspirin which is commonly prescribed for  prevention or treatment of heart disease. This video is enigmatically entitled ‘Welcome to the primary Bank of Aspirin’.

The best banks to put your money in are those which keep your money safe and give you a good return for your investment and where your returns are not eroded by excessive additional charges or fines. In the same sense the best medications to take are those that are both safe but also in the long term offer a substantial return in terms of either improving quality of life and/or an improvement in length of life.  Assessing the return in terms of quality of life is easy because you the individual can measure your quality of life and work out whether it has improved or not. Length of life is much more difficult because as an individual you will never know whether a medication has prolonged your life or not. So the only way to decide whether a medication offers good returns is to look at data that has been accrued from studies of patients just like us and use those data to decide whether the returns from taking that medication are good enough for us or not. If we think about it, this is how we decide to invest our money in a bank. We do our research to ensure that our capital will be safe and what rates of interest we would get before parting with our hard earned cash. Unfortunately we rarely do the same with the medications that we are asked to take. We just take medications because the doctor tells us it is good for us. We rarely ever ask ‘how good’. And the incredible thing is that this answer should be easily available because all quantitative research about using numbers to tell us how good something is and yet rarely are we given the number to help us make our decision. However trying to get these numbers is anything but easy because the numbers that really matter are often concealed in complex statistics and relative percentages rather than being completely transparent. In that sense, it is far easier to get numbers from bankers than it is from the pharma industry. In this video, i wanted to try and get those numbers and put them in front of you so that you can decide for yourselves whether the numbers are good enough to justify your investment in a particular medication. As always i would like to stress that please do not make any changes to your medications without speaking with your own healthcare provider as the information i present here may not be applicable to your unique situation.

Today i welcome you to the primary bank of Aspirin. This is called the Primary bank because it is only for those people who have never had a heart attack or a stroke but are looking to prevent one from happening by taking Aspirin daily. This video is not for those patients who have already had a heart attack or a stroke or stents or bypasses or some other form of vascular event who are trying to prevent a further event by taking Aspirin. For those people there exists the secondary bank of Aspirin which i shall talk about in a later video. So if you have never had a cardiac event or a stroke, the primary bank of Aspirin is the bank that you need to know about.