Doctors pose statins, and patients, many of them women, say, ‘Nah’
Women have their reasons, if anyone would bother to ask
I am struck, in reading “Women found more apt to refuse statins” (Page A1, March 1), by the extent to which the physicians decrying women’s refusal to accept initial statin prescriptions rely on guesses and suppositions about the patients’ reasoning. Maybe women don’t think they can have heart disease, they posit, or maybe women believe misleading online data. Or if we’re native speakers of English, maybe we’ve used our skills to misinform ourselves. No one seems actually to have asked. Late in the article, one physician notes the lack of organized, easily accessible data about statin use.
Those of us women old enough to have reached the statin-prescribing point in our medical histories have experienced, in many cases, decades of medical condescension, authoritarianism, dismissal, and misdiagnosis.
Chances are pretty good that the first statin offering came when we tripped an automated algorithm (a year older, a tiny rise in total cholesterol) in a large health care system. If we were determined enough to ask questions, we might well have found that our chances of negative outcomes were still minuscule.
Get Today in Opinion
We are all, regardless of our gender, endangered by a medical system still rife with demands that we accept unquestioningly any medical advice offered us. Most of us are quite capable of understanding real data. And if anyone asked us, we might explain our thinking.
Kathleen Scharf
Wakefield
The literature on the medication is more daunting than informative
In her article “Women found more apt to refuse statins,” Kay Lazar writes that researchers found that patients most likely to decline statins were those whose primary language was English.
One explanation may be that those of us who read English might be more likely to try to understand the pamphlet that is included with statins. The pamphlet with my statin measures 21 inches by 15 inches with extremely small type, in English, on both sides. I was so taken aback by the sheer volume of information I decided not to take the drug.
Michael Wyson
Waltham
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