Your heart treatment: How aggressive should it be?

When you find out you have heart disease, you face many decisions. Among the most important are how to deal with your problem.

Do you want to treat it aggressively, for instance with surgery or strong medicine?
Would you rather first see if something more conservative, for instance eating better and exercising more, would help?

Your doctor and other members of your health care team can give you all kinds of advice. But you have the final say.

So what do you do when your doctor recommends a treatment that you're not sure about?

Guidelines help doctors make decisions

Doctors generally make decisions based on clearly defined clinical guidelines. If studies show that a certain treatment brings good outcomes in people with your condition, your doctor will probably recommend it for you.

Research like this helps make treatment guidelines for doctors:

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people with unstable angina who had more invasive treatment, including cardiac catheterization, had fewer "cardiac events" than people who had more conservative treatment.
Other studies point to statins as the best medicine for high cholesterol. So despite bad press about popular statins like Lipitor®, the American Heart Association recommends them as long as doctors and patients take certain precautions.

Ask questions!

If your doctor tells you that you need angioplasty, ask why. The same goes for any surgery, medicine or lifestyle change.

There's nothing worse than feeling like your treatment isn’t right for you. So sit down with your doctor and ask for a clear explanation. And keep asking until you fully understand.

You need to feel good about your decisions. That's why getting all the information you can is so important.