OH MY GOD WHAT? I had no idea. Is this true? Those are insane numbers. Every day?! Aspirin has a pretty bad reputation in my book in the first place. Don’t take it unless you very, very explicitly...
A whopping 29 million Americans take aspirin every single day in order to prevent heart disease.
OH MY GOD WHAT?
I had no idea. Is this true? Those are insane numbers. Every day?!
Aspirin has a pretty bad reputation in my book in the first place. Don’t take it unless you very, very explicitly need the effects of a blood thinner.
In my childhood it was synonym with painkiller but I would say about 20 years ago it got displaced by paracetamol entirely. I myself have never taken aspirin in my life.
Edit: that website, The NNT, has near immediately graduated to a reference for me. After browsing it for a bit, it looks fantastic, I’ll be checking it often for future treatments.
Medical recommendations change all the time, as knowledge is updated. But I think this case is a particularly teachable moment, highlighting the importance of comparing costs and benefits on the same scale. And there’s an important concept in medicine that can help with that — namely: NNT.
NNT is an abbreviation for “number needed to treat.” In other words: How many patients must be treated with the drug in order for a single patient to get the desired benefit?
OH MY GOD WHAT?
I had no idea. Is this true? Those are insane numbers. Every day?!
Aspirin has a pretty bad reputation in my book in the first place. Don’t take it unless you very, very explicitly need the effects of a blood thinner.
In my childhood it was synonym with painkiller but I would say about 20 years ago it got displaced by paracetamol entirely. I myself have never taken aspirin in my life.
Edit: that website, The NNT, has near immediately graduated to a reference for me. After browsing it for a bit, it looks fantastic, I’ll be checking it often for future treatments.
Apparently the most common recommendation was a low dose (81 mg).
Still, who knows what people really do. Sometimes people think more is better.
From the article: