I recently recommended statin therapy to a 68-year-old patient, explaining that it would reduce his risk of a major coronary event or stroke in the next 10 years from 18% to 15%. He asked, “But how will we know if it works?” I confessed we never would because success would be an uneventful walk through good health. He was not sold.
As this story shows, prevention can be a hard sell but we all know that it is also the best way to promote the health of individual patients and the population from whence they come.