Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, has died
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I saw someone say on Twitter "Dave defined the word 'mensch'" - very true.
http://thisweekinstartups.com/dave-goldberg-of-surveymonkey-...
http://recode.net/2015/05/02/beloved-silicon-valley-entrepre...
Ryan Davis from Giantbomb also died suddenly while on his honeymoon.
http://www.giantbomb.com/ryan-davis/3040-93335/forums/ryan-d...
I spent 4+ years not getting any REM sleep and my metabolism STILL suffers as a result - even 14 years after starting on CPAP and using it EVERY night since then.
It's too long to go into here - but I did a writeup years ago about my "journey", along with my wife's issues with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome).
http://weblog.mrbill.net/archives/2014/01/13/falling-in-love...
Do you snore (badly)? Do you find yourself tossing and turning a LOT at night? Do you wake up gasping or with a general sense of dread/fear? Are you super-tired during the day? Have you ever fallen asleep while typing, while at a stoplight in your car, etc? Talk to a doctor about having a sleep study done. It might save your life.
I was diagnosed with sleep hypopnea, which is not as severe as sleep apnea. The difference between the two is how low your pulse ox falls while you have stopped breathing. I think my diagnosis was an artifact of the sleep study however because they didn't really let me sleep very much during the study.
I am using a CPAP and my health has greatly improved. Lower blood pressure, feeling like I got real rest during the night, improved cognitive function. Still dealing with some metabolic issues, which I am trying to resolve with diet, eating habits and exercise.
PS I knew I snored. I never imagined I had sleep apnea until I got married and my wife observed that I would stop breathing in the middle of the night.
http://examine.com/faq/does-metabolism-vary-between-two-peop...
> Metabolic rate does vary, and technically there could be large variance. However, statistically speaking it is unlikely the variance would apply to you. The majority of the population exists in a range of 200-300kcal from each other and do not possess hugely different metabolic rates.
Note that caloric intake is exceptionally difficult to measure accurately (even for people who consistently log calories), so it would probably be unwise to attempt to self-diagnose. If you suspect you have a problem, you should consult a physician.
Anyway he's seen a doctor many times, mostly for heart/cancer stuff, but also specifically for his sleeping problems. But there was never this response that his life was in danger and that he needed studies done because it might kill him, while the healthcare system is quite advanced here...
some people just die young/young-ish of natural causes. i personally know several people who have had freak heart attacks or brain conditions and passed away. it's sad, but a fact of life (and death).
i.e. If you already have work life balance, there's not need to stress it.
Not making an effort and letting your employees know that you don't expect them to work nights and weekends means you are ignoring the societal norms in our field and most likely have engineers working their way towards burnout.
If he wants to talk about an issue in Silicon Valley, he can do it pretty much anywhere but this one page.
I stand by my point: either you were suggesting that drug abuse might be a factor here or you were bringing up something approximately irrelevant. Either way, that's shitty. Let people have their time to pay their respects and mourn without you jumping in with your kids-eat-your-veggies hobbyhorse.
It's been observed many times before that when someone online starts describing another persons stance as "either you X or you Y" they're generally involved in a false dichotomy.
So congratulations wpeitri, you're just like almost everyone else on the internet. You have an opinion and nothing will convince you otherwise.
Are you happy about that?
By the way, your I-am-the-superior-intellect pose would be more convincing with better spelling. Note also that "It's been observed" and "they're generally" is classic weasel wording. [1] If you think the truth lies outside my constructed dichotomy, by all means make it clear what you are claiming the truth is.
You know, I never said anything about 'illegal drug use'. Maybe I chose poor words that would have one think I meant that? But I made several comments elaborating that's not what I meant after having made the initial comment. You made your posts after I made those comments. And I'm telling you now too that's not what I meant -- and I told you that before too -- it's just not what I meant. So there's really no reason to keep going on about this, do we agree?
Maybe take a break and smell the fresh air? I hope all is well with you.
I don't have any need to keep talking about it, and you seem unwilling to come to grips with my actual point, so if you'd like to be done with it, I'm not stopping you.
It isn't really about me using weasel words or swapping the i/e in your name, it's about you using character assassination in your head to convince yourself I can't possibly have a point.
Good day to you.
This is an example where I'd far rather people just downvote each other and move on than post these bickering threads.
Maybe I'm wrong though.
We have every right to communicate, no one has verbally attacked anyone else, if it really bothers you just skip on by instead of taking the time to make sure we're aware that you're judging everyone involved in the conversation.
Is that unfair? Well, so where you :)
That said I think his wife probably made sure he got good access to healthcare, if he didn't take the initiative himself. But it probably is somewhere between every three months and every year. Major sports players, top celebrities or Paul Atreides have the level of access that make it extremely rare, but a well connected tech executive just has a level of access that reduces the risk somewhat.
This. A thousand times.
So many people in the valley just lose track of time, or they put their health on the back burner for just one more month, or miss that yearly physical, and then suddenly it catches up with them.
Saying he was a proponent of work life balance does not mean his job was a walk in the park either. You're in one of the most competitive markets, with a successful startup. I can easily see why executives at his lever would start to cut corners on their health.
It's too bad really. He sounds like one of the guys you would really root for to be successful. At the very least, I'm glad he was able to achieve some of his dreams - something a large portion of the population never get a chance at.
If anything it should remind everybody. Take a break, call your family and tell them you love them, hug your kids and tell them you love them. You never know man, you just never know when your time is going to be up.
Having seen thousands of these studies I can state that many people have severe coronary artery disease at young ages (in their thirties). They are at risk for sudden death. Often they come in for the exam because a parent or sibling died prematurely either recently or at the same age as they are now.
What's interesting, in my experience, is that very often when siblings get the exam, the one with obvious risk factors such as obesity, smoking, diabetes, etc has a normal exam result and the sib with no risk factors (other than maybe sharing a bad family history) has severe disease.
Read about CCTA http://goo.gl/o1RvD5
May the family of the deceased find peace.
I wont try to speculate what actually happened out of respect for him and his family but I can assure you that he was not the standard silicon valley go hard all night type of CEO.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good."
W. H. Auden
http://www.unz.com/isteve/dave-goldberg-died-same-day-as-car...
My condolences to his family.
One mans expensive toy is anothers childhood dream or self promised reward for decades of hard work.
And who knows, it may turn out to be a good investment in the longer term, Porsches and Ferraris have a way of keeping their value (provided you don't drive them too much or wrap them around a tree).
After I hit reply here, I'm going to finish the entire document before I come back here. I have too many loved ones to leave stranded in this world after me just because I was too lazy and distracted to do what's needed.
In January 2009 I was Stage 5 chronic kidney disease, in July 2009 I had a kidney transplant. Looking back there were so many telltale signs that I had over the last six months, which I was ignoring as I was busy building my startup. A regular health check has the potential to catch a problem like this. I now nag each of my friends and family in having an annual health check.
Its the best time you can spend.
This was not the first time I made a mistake like this. When I was a kid, I had trouble seeing my teacher's blackboard. I just kept moving closer to the blackboard. I saw a doctor when I had trouble understanding what the teacher was writing from the first row.
Problems like this creep up on you over years, and they are so gradual you don't realize them.
You wont run your site without a Google Analytics/Pingdom. Dont do it with your life. If you haven't had a health check, get it done today.
If some or all of these are "no", it's not a comprehensive exam.
http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Topic/reco...
You don't really have a doctor girlfriend, do you? :)
I would consider tests comprehensive if tests all major internal organs (kidney, liver, heart, spleen + common cancers depending on gender/age), you can come up with one after talking to a physician. Because I am based in India, I can only recommend India specific one, https://www.apollohospitals.com/preventive-health-care-check... are generally good.
Start by NOT asking random people on the internet.
Ask your doctor about what tests to do and he'll tell you based on your age / history, and you can trust him better than a random stranger or some web post.
Law and Medicine are two of the things most likely to precipitate a lot of online commentary by people who don't have the first clue of what they're talking about.
If I met a community of strong critical thinkers about Chemistry or Civic Engineering I wouldn't ask them advice for my software stack.
Besides, with the exception of a 20% or less who knows what they're talking about (and those only for narrow Computer Science or Engineering fields each), the others might as well be on Reddit. You can find tons of uninformed opinion about anything here. Plus a huge tendency to go with the latest fads (Rails, then JS, then Go, then Rust, etc).
>Doctors aren't mythical beings
No, just trained professionals.
Also, avoid being caught in modern media's constant drive toward polarizing sensationalism; your own life is actually fair simpler and more enjoyable than the internet and TV would have you believe (if you live in the first world)
Sometimes, thanks to technology, we don't know who has access to our data and whether this is going to be used against us: for example, will we have an impossibly high insurance premium attached to us for life - with the data in our hands, we lose the right to use insurance to even out that risk.
Sometimes, in medicine, there are ethical considerations, that the eventual treatment for a screened condition presents its own risk that people may not wish to decide and the healthcare system might not be well-equipped to manage.
Nonetheless, I still personally prefer to have the data than not. I want to decide my own healthcare needs based on my own knowledge and understanding of my own risks. This is "data driven".
> I fail to see how screening of healthy, relatively young, people would be "data driven".
So just by looking at yourself, you don't know if you are healthy, only that you look healthy. The tests are to ensure that you are, and to give you time and flexibility of treatment if you are not.
Or you might want to postpone your visit to the doctor until you have an actual reason to go there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/opinion/skip-your-annual-p...
http://kaiserhealthnews.org/news/ritual-not-science-keeps-th...
According to http://www.clinchem.org/content/47/4/624.full
> CEA as a Marker for Colorectal Cancer
> screening
> In screening for colorectal cancer, the aim should be to detect disease at either Dukes’ A or B stage. Malignancy detected at more advanced stages is unlikely to be more treatable than that detected through the usual course of events. Using an upper limit of normal of 2.5 μg/L, Fletcher (19) calculated that CEA has a sensitivity of 36% and a specificity of 87% in screening for Dukes’ A and B colorectal cancer. These findings, combined with the low prevalence of this malignancy in unselected populations, render the positive predictive value of CEA unacceptably low and thus of little value in screening healthy subjects. For the present, therefore, we must rely on fecal occult blood and endoscopy to screen for colorectal cancer (20).
What does 36% sensitivity and 87% specificity mean? Imagine that you test ten thousand 40-year olds and twenty-five of them do actually have colon cancer (this is more or less consistent with statistics telling that 0.23 of them will be diagnosed with colon cancer before turning 50). You will get a true positive result in 9 cases (out of 25) and a false positive in 1297 (out of 9975). So only 0.7% of the positive cases are real, and you missed two thirds of the cancers.
It's perhaps unintuitive, but more testing isn't always good. The benefits need to outweigh the risks, and it isn't always the case. There are ongoing debates about who should be screened for various types of cancer, for example, and the "right" answer changes over time - as we find ways to reduce false positives, as we find better treatments, as we better understand the diseases, etc.
It's tempting to do more tests because it feels like you're doing something. You don't want to get sick later and feel like you could have prevented that. But that's an irrational form of thinking. All that we can do is make the best choice now, given our current information. As GP's links mention, the best choice we have now often seems like "avoid tests that aren't clearly needed."
(Six months after surgery - I'm well so far, still doing chemo for the next three months. We'll see, we'll see.)
Still, one needs to be careful about taking one incident and generalizing from that. There is, for example, a very real possibility that performing an ionizing-radiation scan for every patient who presented with acid reflux would cause more cancer than it cured.
> Yeah, pancreatic cancer patient here. Mine presented as acid reflux, which my GP treated with Prilosec.
The fact that you walked in with pancreatic cancer and got told you have heartburn doesn't exactly argue for regular checkups.
Probably 99 out of 100 people with GP's symptoms (if not more) actually do have acid reflux. It therefore makes medical sense to assume that until additional symptoms indicate a different conclusion.
There has been a big push back recently against using an improvement in 5 year survival rate as an indication of success in the war on cancer. For example, if a new diagnostic test lets you find out you have cancer earlier, but you still end up dying at the same age you would anyway, the 5 year survival rate would go up, with no real benefit to you. In fact, there could be lots of real negatives, like anxiety and an increase in other tests and procedures that don't actually improve your lifespan or quality of life.
The conclusion: "Although 5-year survival is a valid measure for comparing cancer therapies in a randomized trial, our analysis shows that changes in 5-year survival over time bear little relationship to changes in cancer mortality. Instead, they appear primarily related to changing patterns of diagnosis."
So, yes. Please find a good primary care physician you trust and visit on an annual basis. Make sure you update that phsyician with what's going on in your life. That includes any family history, pain, issues etc. When in doubt, see another physician. But please don't go out and get a full MRI of your body just because (which, you are not saying, but does happen). There are enough VOMITs[0] in the course of normal defensive medicine. Don't go looking for problems because -- although they'll definitely help you look -- you might not be better off for it.
A central problem is that you get loads of false positives when you are screening symptom-free individuals, and these false positives can cause real harm: beyond anxiety, they often bring on potentially painful, expensive and side-effect causing treatments. Just see the recent recommendations over the PSA test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostate_cancer_screening.
Definitely go to the doctor if you notice any symptoms or worrisome changes. For other types of screenings, be aware that the recommendations often change and that there is a real cost/benefit analysis (even in terms of your own body, not just financial cost) to be done.
I am thankful every day that I had a great GP who both did enough to be prudent, and also helped me stay balanced and not go overboard, in just the right way. I could have been a lot worse off had I continued to pursue treatment.
That said, in a state where anxiety is controlled and my health is now stable, it's still important to be aware of changes and new symptoms, and to have an annual standard physical with a doctor you trust and stick with consistently so they know you and your body over time. Just don't go overboard.
Most tests do have some degree of false positives, but there a number of defensive diagnostic tests which are nearly error free and clinically significant
To name some: * BUN + Serum creatinine - Kidney health * LFT - Liver health * Sugar levels - Early detection of diabetes
I am not recommending a MRI, but everyone should get an annual health check, for some values of comprehensive.
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-03/star-treks-t...
> Most tests do have some degree of false positives,
I think many people don't appreciate the danger of false positives.
The complications that can come from unnecessary treatments, the dangers that more invasive tests might cause, the aggregate effect of all the time and expense the extra testing causes (e.g. by putting a strain on hospitals who may need that MRI for someone else), the negative emotional consequences of the stress from the false diagnosis, the possible financial implications etc. Even a very small chance of a false positive can have huge consequences if the test is deployed widely enough.
Yes, but to most people, we compare that danger with the danger of a positive test that never gets done. More information is never a bad thing. And I'm reasonably sure that for almost every test that can have a dangerous false-positive, there is also a corresponding test that can corroborate those results, if not detect the false-positive.
There's nothing wrong with getting an MRI every year if you aren't actually looking at it on its own, but rather diffing it in a time-series, and extracting chartable statistics from it, to see if anything in your body is getting progressively [adjective]er each year.
This approach won't actually tell you if you've got six months to live, but it's not supposed to. It's to show you that your liver has been getting 10% more scarred over with each visit, so—with evidence!—you'd better lay off the booze already. Or to find something like arteriosclerosis before it presents clinically.
There is a whole team clustered around an MRI machine and tying up the machine is effectively tying up the team.
If everybody got an MRI every year on the off chance they might have something then the machines would not be available to those that actually need them (because they have symptoms that require an MRI to narrow in on a cause).
And that's besides the whole fall-out further down the chain in case something does show up that does not generate symptoms and even further down the chain where probably un-necessary operations will be performed on symptom-less patients.
Doing the right amount of screening is a really hard problem. Getting an MRI done every year just because you can afford it is probably not even near the right amount.
Imagine if you could get an MRI the way you currently get a blood pressure test or ultrasound or x-ray. Imagine a simplified MRI machine in every GP's office 40 years from now. Imagine the machine having a networked software layer integrated that doesn't even allow the raw static-image data out to the doctors, but instead just reports out weighted-average feature-change velocity heatmaps.
Presumably, the only people getting an MRI done every year now are the ridiculously rich, who could buy an MRI machine of their own, and a hospital wing to put it in. But the theory behind getting one isn't bad. It's just scarcity, and the effect scarcity has on the level of trust we put in the few samples we can beg, borrow or steal.
So you're going to need the crew of attendants and interpreters with associated costs regardless of the price of the machine.
What cheap MRI machines will do is marginally reduce the cost of a scan, which would be a good thing but over the life of the machine it is the people that make up the bigger chunk of the cost.
Mobile MRI machines are currently truck sized, something that could be moved around in a suitcase and set up on the spot would be a game changer in the third world (as would be cheaper MRI machines to begin with), but for the first world it wouldn't be so much of a change.
What did change things dramatically was the reduction in the cost of ultra-sound but the complexity of an ultra-sound scanner compared to an MRI machine is orders of magnitude less, interpreting the results is still not the job of the tech administering the scan (though in the case of say a look at an infant in utero even a lay person can make out what is what and that's already useful).
Healthcare costs are an interesting subject of study, you could easily make a career out of that.
Say that a random scan uncovers that you have a minor brain aneurysm. The aneurysm's size and location implies it has a chance of rupture of around 0.2% per year. The operation to resolve the aneurysm, however, may have a 5% risk of death.
Weighing up the decision to have an operation is incredibly difficult, since most would be rather distracted by the idea of a ticking timebomb going off in their head at any time, yet the risk of the operation is more immediately significant. If undetected, the aneurysm may never rupture, or it may grow to a size where it causes other symptoms and can then be operated on.
(Or, of course, as in the case of a young friend of mine in his then early 20s, pretty much anyone can keel over at any time due to an undetected aneurysm anyway.. it's totally pot luck.)
[1] https://health.ucsd.edu/specialties/ehw/services/Pages/gold....
The thing to think about when you test for something, is what are you prepared to do about it if the results are positive? Not everyone will answer this question the same way.
As one example of many, consider prostate cancer screening: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/811846
When the procedure was finished, I was told they would analyze the result, but I had a cancerous tumor and they sent me for a CT scan which confirmed stage iv colon cancer with liver metastasis. I'm now 8 months into chemo and after having my sigmoid colon removed, seem to have "stable disease" in my liver. I was otherwise asymptomatic.
Another chap at my company wasn't so lucky. He got hit by a car and lost consciousness. They did an MRI to check out his brain - and found tumors. A CT scan showed the same don't diagnosis as me, but his was far more advanced, with mean mastastasasis to the liver, lungs and brain. He passed away about 5 months later and was otherwise asymptomatic.
In both our cases, A blood test given after the diagnosis (CEA) showed highly elevated numbers - perhaps two orders of magnitude from nominal.
So my question would be: given that this blood test was a marker for our disease, why can't it be given more regularly as part of a routine checkup? I realize there are other reasons for a false positive, but couldn't it be an indication that further testing should be done? Yes a CT scan can cost $1500, but my chemo costs $12,000 per month.
Basically, radiologists are more afraid of being sued for missing something then they are of being sued for being too cautious. Evasive language is a defence against the latter.
This is a uniquely American condition BTW. Most other places, the liability rules are different and doctors aren't as afraid of lawsuits / insurance premium hikes.
Colon cancer can be effectively treated when Caught in it's early stages. During my (first) colonoscopy they found another tumor that got removed in the first of several surgeries, and it had clear margins and required to further treatment.
http://healthblog.dallasnews.com/2015/04/mark-cuban-is-wrong...
Thanks for sharing! Having known and worked with you for years I could not agree more. I ran the startup life for 6 years and it'll eat you alive if you let it.
Regards, Lane
So sure - get health checks done. Then be prepared to spend weeks or months double checking what your doctor is telling you, and possibly getting 2nd opinions and more tests.
Personal story: Head health test. High A1C. Diagnosed Diabetic, despite being a very fit triathlete who hasn't drank soda in 6 years and eats < 20g of sugar a day. Literally had near 2 weeks of full blown panic attack. Tried to change my diet to crazy low glycemic index food and eat 8 times a day to try and get my A1C down without medicine.
2 weeks later got into a 2nd doctor for another opinion. Turned out my test was just bunk. A1C is fantastic. Apparently it happens all the time (a bad test). My first doctor did not tell me this at ALL.. just told me I was a diabetic and to stop drinking so much Soda.
My takeaway? If not showing signs, don't bother with routine tests. Too many medical quacks.
It's a good question what are the best tests to do periodically. I doubt that "none" is the right answer.
Here is a good article I read today on the topic:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-g...
Basically.. lots of things can be found by a test (say a slow or non-growing tumor) that the risk of removing them is > than the risk of leaving them alone.
Of course doctors are paid for doing work not for leaving it alone, so which do you think they will choose?
And yes, you should stop drinking soda, diabetic or not. Nothing bad will come from not drinking it, but plenty of bad things can come from drinking it. Telling you this doesn't make either your doctor or me a "quack".
67, been following a congenital heart murmur for years. Cholesterol at 130. Noticed my running and biking dropping performance dropping off, so think time for a heart valve replacement. Routine pre-op catheterization shows coronary artery blockage. Have bypass and valve replacement, doing great. But 130 was too much cholesterol for me apparently. On statins and down to 95! I am now 68, no prostate, artificial heart valve, bypassed coronary artery, but feel great and am still active.
Glad the heart surgery took place after I started medicare though. Say want you want about government ineptitude administering anything, but medicare works.
It's 2015, and there's still no general agreement on which tests to run to tell if you are healthy or not. We don't even have firm evidence whether your annual physical with a doctor is a net positive or negative.
Meanwhile, people are dying decades prematurely due to uncaught illnesses that we know how to fix.
We have a check engine light for our car engine. Why on earth don't we have one for our bodies yet?
If your car starts easily and runs well, has no changes in fuel economy, and you have been keeping up with basic maintenance, it's probably fine.
Same with people. Sure there are some people who just drop dead out of the blue. But most people have symptoms. Unexplained weight gain or loss. Fatigue. Difficulty sleeping. Changes in bodily functions. For most people, if you have no symptoms and feel healthy, you most likely are. If you have family history of certain problems, of course be more vigilant about that.
We can't possibly continually test everybody for everything that might possibly be wrong with them, at least not until we have Star-Trek style medical devices. Unjustified testing in the absence of symptoms will simply further drive up the cost of medical care for those who really need it. One could argue that it already has.
I wanted to add my thoughts about false positives and executive health checkups, which fall under the larger umbrella of screening. I conduct executive checkups fairly regularly, but i’m not promoting anything here. I just want to share a personal philosophy that you, as a patient, could adopt to reduce risk.
Firstly, it should be stated that the utility and performance of any diagnostic test that has a binary outcome (eg. diseased/healthy) depends on 1) its intrinsic test characteristics 2) the prevalence of the disease in the population being tested[1], 3) the available diagnostic/treatment options for positive people, and 4) the threshold chosen to call something ‘positive’ since you are virtually always measuring a continuous variable.
People talk about false positives often, but you should know that there is some room for judgement here. The typical threshold for PSA has historically been 4.0 ng/mL. Above this is considered a positive screen, and you are recommended further testing to confirm prostate cancer, which can be invasive and lead to complications (bleeding, nerve damage, etc). This kind of two-stage testing is a common theme. The issue is that PSA values in people with cancer and people without cancer are normally distributed and have some overlap. A value of 4.0 is in the overlap zone, and the vast majority of people with 4.0 will not have cancer. However, lets say hypothetically that guidelines changed and we now use 20. At this level, most people who test positive probably have something bad, and the risk:benefit ratio is in favor of confirmatory testing and probably in favor of treatment too. I won’t bother going into it, but there’s a fair amount of liability, psychology and economics at play when choosing thresholds. Biochemical tests like PSA do have some variance, but are mostly reliable. It’s more complicated with imaging and amorphous things like mammograms that have some operator variability in judgement (and hence more liability).
This was a long-winded way to say that information is not necessarily bad, but it’s what you and your doctor choose to do with it. There’s room for discussing probabilities, and the various available pathways. Trust is huge. Your doctor will act in your best interests when he feels safe from lawsuits, otherwise he'll be focused on not missing anything regardless of likelihood or cost. The financial misalignment of our system doesn’t help in building trust either. Most first-stage screening tests have very minimal risk involved. Things like checking your blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, doing a treadmill stress test, reviewing your meds, vaccinations, etc which are part of these annual checkup programs are, on balance, usually good ideas.
A few years ago a nurse told me my blood pressure was a bit high but I didnt think it was that high to worry about so I never followed up on it. Then a few months ago I went for a dental check up where they checked my blood pressure and after a particularly chaotic morning the nurse told me my blood pressure was 220 over 150, which is crazy high blood pressure The dentist ended the appointment and told me very strongly to go straight to the doctor. When I got there my pressure had gone down to 150 / 90, but the doctor started me on a low dose of blood pressure medicine. It costs $5.00 per month, and who knows what health disaster was awaiting me had I not discovered this.
Even if you are relatively normal weight, in your 20s, and healthy, you could still have issues and not realize it until you have a check up.
Knowing something (blood pressure is high) is cool.. but turning that into (I must pop pill X) doesn't always seem like the best strategy.
I am active, eat healthy, and have tried to go off of my high blood pressure meds more than once, but each time, my blood pressure creeps back up. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. Don't be scared of medicine when it's the right option.
It seems that doctors in South Africs have a fairly high threshold for prescribing medications for blood pressure to younger people. The contrast with your case in the U.S., where the doctor started you on BP meds immediately is quite striking.
I think it's a difficult task in that you can't include everyone...but I think it'd be fine if the admins did it by personal consensus...I imagine who they think would be noteworthy would be in line with what most users think.
The black bar exists because the owners/admins deem it to exist. It is necessarily a mark of respect granted by them, not by the community.
Any discussion or meta-discussion about its application will only confuse this true meaning and doesn't help anyone.
I'm sure every single one of us cares that people died yesterday. Don't want to get into a big debate, jus sayin. #deepbreaths
http://entrepreneurzine.com/dave-goldberg-surveymonkey-at-st...