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LETTERS: Malcolm Law, Joan K Morris, and Nicholas Wald Authors’ reply BMJ 2009; 338: b2602 [Full text]

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Medication for the Healthy

Peter A West   (29 June 2009)

Medication for the Healthy 29 June 2009
Peter A West, Health Economist York Health Economics Consortium Send response to journal: Re: Medication for the Healthy	As a healthy 59 year old male with no major risk factors and a history of low blood pressure, do I really want to take a statin and a second medicine for blood pressure every day? Almost every medicine I have tried in the recent past, for whatever reason, seemed to give me side effects, real or imagined. Why would I want medication for life for relatively small risk reductions? Giving up cycling and therefore preventing death on the road would probably be more beneficial but I have no plans to do that either. Once the absolute risk reduction is small, we surely should not be attempting to medicate the entire older population when we can offer to people such as me no protection against physical frailty or dementia and, currently, no easy escape from a life of low apparent benefit. Competing interests: The author is a health economist. He is not currently nor has ever worked on the assessment of hypertension or blood pressure reducing therapies.