Strokes can be disastrous – at the very least they can leave you partly paralysed, because some of your muscles are not working for the rest of your life. We know a girl personally who had a stroke at the age of 35 – she couldn’t lift her arms above her head, couldn’t hang her washing on the line, for the rest of her life. And it could have been a lot worse – she could have had parts of her brain not working.
It is said that the right medication “GUARANTEES” you against strokes! We suspect that this word may be a bit strong, even though a heart specialist we know uses it. At the very least it helps a great deal, obviously.
It works by keeping your blood thinner, with just a tiny pill taken each night.
For more than 60 years the medication used was Warfarin – there seemed to be nothing else around. But Warfarin has enormous problems – see this Wikipedia article.
As this article tells us, Warfarin was introduced in 1948 to kill rats and mice, and it’s still used for this – it causes so much internal bleeding in them that they die. And then it started to be used in humans as it was found to be “relatively safe” in keeping their blood thin.
“Relatively safe!!!!!!??????” A doctor once told us that two of his patients had to have blood transfusions after they taken too much Warfarin, and in a retirement home he used to visit there was a man who was in a coma for 18 months after taking too much Warfarin.
If you’re on Warfarin, you really need to have a blood test once a month, as there are all sorts of factors that affect how much you should be taking, and if you’re taking too little it won’t be doing you any good, and if you’re taking too much you could have the sort of problems we’ve described.
In the last 2 or 3 years, medications have been introduced that make the blood thinner without all the problems associated with Warfarin – Xarelto is one we’re familiar with, but we suspect there may be others.
Someone we were talking to once, who had been on Warfarin for a while, told us that his GP had advised him that since he was used to Warfarin he may as well stay on it!!!!!!?????? To us this is complete and utter madness – one should move on to one of the new medications the moment one could.
If anyone knows of a better information article or articles on Strokes and Warfarin than this one, and we’re sure there are lots of them out there, we would be most grateful if they could let us know, for our benefit and so that we could let our readers know about them.