Aspirin Is Ineffective & Dangerous, But Cardiologists Bemoan Patients' Refusal to Use It

by Heidi Stevenson

12 February 2010

With typical hubris, cardiologists are expressing frustration at their inability to get patients to take aspirin as a preventive for heart disease. The ongoing REACH (REduction of Atherothrombosis for Continued Health) study has documented a lack of patient adherence to their doctors' insistence that they take it.

It is well-documented that only men (not women) who have already had heart attacks benefit from taking aspirin, and everyone who takes it is at risk for gastrointestinal bleeding, which can be deadly.⁽¹⁾ Could it be that patients know something their doctors don't?

The senior author of the REACH study, Dr. Deepak Bhatt of Brigham and Women's Hospital stated:

Given the relatively large percentage of patients who weren't receiving aspirin in the secondary-prevention patients, this does help bring into focus the number of US patients whom the guidelines say should be on aspirin who aren't. And I think that has public-health importance.

He's right, but not in the way he intends. If more people were to take aspirin in an attempt to prevent heart disease, a significant number of them would end up in the hospital from gastrointestinal bleeding—but almost none of them would be protected from a heart attack.

The study purportedly looks at patients with existing vascular disease. However, they define vascular disease extremely broadly, not simply as men who've had heart attacks, the only group shown to benefit from so-called aspirin therapy.

Tricks like that are often used to scare patients into doing what their doctors say, and to convince the doctors themselves that they're right to prescribe dangerous and useless drugs.

Dr. Bhatt pays lip service to concerns about taking aspirin for what he terms primary-prevention. Yet, his definition of secondary-prevention does not match the only definition of people who could benefit from aspirin: men—not women—who have already suffered heart attacks. Bhatt's definition of secondary-prevention includes anyone who has been identified as being at increased risk of heart disease, including high blood pressure, smoking, and diabetes. Where does it stop?

Imagine being a smoker, going to a doctor, and being told that you need to take aspirin. According to this study, your doctor should tell you precisely that, and if you were included in the REACH study, you'd be among the 75% of patients counted as derelict for not taking it.

Modern medicine defines classes of people as being at risk for particular diseases, and then treats their potential—not actually existing—diseases with drugs. It's a brilliant marketing technique, but it has nothing to do with health, except in a negative correlation.

Cardiology has broadened the group of people who must be treated with their dangerous drugs, which have never been proven to prevent heart attacks in most cases, simply by defining certain people as being at high risk. While it's certainly true that a smoker is at increased risk of heart attack, the solution isn't to take a pharmaceutical drug. The solution is to quit smoking. No, it isn't easy to quit, but taking a drug has never been shown to prevent heart disease in smokers.

Modern medicine is creating guidelines advocating that people who are not sick take drugs. Clearly, they are not basing these guidelines on fact, but instead are drawing more and more people into the web of sick care, even to the point of creating illness where none existed. Huge numbers of people who cannot benefit from taking aspirin are being exposed to a new risk that they weren't facing before: gastrointestinal bleeding.

The bottom line is that health is not a matter of ingesting chemicals. The REACH study seems to be showing that the general public is more likely to recognize that than their doctors. The general public has more common sense than their doctors!

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