I Now Have a Cardiologist

Pretty much the entirety of the article you're selectively quoting is praising preventative care.

The byline is "Contrary to conventional wisdom, it tends to cost money, but it improves quality of life at a very reasonable price."

and the article closes with this

But money doesn’t have to be saved to make something worthwhile. Prevention improves outcomes. It makes people healthier. It improves quality of life. It often does so for a very reasonable price.

There are many good arguments for increasing our focus on prevention. Almost all have to do with improving quality, though, not reducing spending. We would do well to admit that and move forward.

Sometimes good things cost money.

Objectively speaking it's infrequent enough (only 3 times in my life so far) that it's statistically noise compared to the probability of an accident due to other reasons, including other drivers. There's actually a medical paper that calculates these probabilities, and the gist of it is that I should be okay to drive a small vehicle point-to-point for personal reasons but not be a professional driver that drives a large vehicle multiple hours per day every day.

I'm also thought to be under control via medications now, and also am scheduled for an ablation procedure which may cure it altogether. The bad news about medications, and that procedure, is that it's hard to know whether it cured it, considering how infrequently they happen. I could go another 10 years without incident and then it happens again -- or I could go my entire life and it never happens -- nobody knows. So the best I can do at the moment is to just carry on with life.

That said though, I would still feel emotionally safer if the car drove itself, or at least could detect such things. Not only for myself, but for the sake of those people who have incurable frequent instances of incapacitation -- they actually are not advised to never drive -- as well as the entire rest of the population that is over-stressed and under-slept.

Also, I feel what has happened to me could happen to anyone. Doctors haven't been able to diagnose any particular cause, but I have been under extreme work stress over the years, and the connection between that and heart failure among other things is really not well understood. Extreme electrolyte loss is another way any otherwise normal person could go into ventricular fibrillation as well, and that's not something everyone is educated about.

I bike most of the time, and drive only occasionally, by the way. If you look at that in isolation, yes, I'm more likely to die being incapacitated on a bike than in a car. But if you look at the problem holistically, biking is more likely to improve my cardiac condition over time via much needed exercise, as well as the reduction in stress by doing stuff I enjoy doing. For all we know, living a life of abstaining from everything could be far more likely to pile on stress that could potentially make things worse.

And that's exactly why anyone who isn't a cardiologist shouldn't be making judgements about the state if your heart.

The heart is pretty complex for being 'just a pump'. Things can and do go wrong in ~100% of the population. Whether or not that's a problem that should be monitored, medicated or operated on, depends on many factors. It isn't as clearcut as saying "you've got afib and we need to fix that".

I’m not arguing over affect, I’m arguing over truth claims. The article leads with the facts and then argues that despite being a poor use of money we should still pay for preventive medicine for the warm fuzzy feelings it gives us. Pay attention to the facts, not the argument that we should ignore the facts for the warm fuzzy feelings.

If we’re going to spend huge amounts of money we should spend it better than on preventive care, on areas where the money can do more good. That money could be spent on foreign aid, on saving lives, not improving them, on earned income tax credit, to encourage people to get back into work or gain more work experience, on basic research or subsidy to get us to carbon neutral faster.

And the article completely fails to note the false positives, the unnecessary tests and the worry caused by preventive screening.

Money spent on preventive medicine isn’t wasted but it could certainly be better spent.

> In 2009, as part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Synthesis Project, Sarah Goodell, Joshua Cohen and Peter Neumann exhaustively explored the evidence. They examined more than 500 peer-reviewed studies that looked at primary (stopping something from happening in the first place) or secondary (stopping something from getting worse) prevention. Of all the interventions they looked at, only two were truly cost-saving: childhood immunizations (a no-brainer) and the counseling of adults on the use of low-dose aspirin. An additional 15 preventive services were cost-effective, meaning that they cost less than $50,000 to $100,000 per quality adjusted life-year gained.

What you describe sounds like health anxiety. Please consider seeking help for that.