Why can’t/don’t doctors regularly check to see if your arteries are majorly clogged?

Question

I often hear stories of a guy who has a heart attack and come to find out that 95% of a major blood vessel to the heart was clogged.

How is this not picked up earlier during normal exams? Why isn’t it?

Can’t they do radiation shots to see where the blood flows or whatever?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Other thing to note is that medical resources: physician time, nurse and OR tech staff availability, clinic space and laboratory respected are actually a finite commodity.

It’s a little hard to understand because we really live in a society where, if you want strawberries in the off season, you can still get them, if you want a sports car and you have enough money, you can still get one.

Medical resources really aren’t like that, however.

We have had times where we ran out of morphine,l and normal saline solution because not enough was being produced

During Covid, we ran out of operating room gowns and boots and facemasks and tiny little rubber nasal cannulas

Nurses are already stretched so thin that they have been leaving the field in droves, causing nursing shortages in hospitals

Physicians are so overworked and stretched that “burnout” is actually a real severe thing and finding ways to prevent it is crucial to maintaining the current medical system.

There are not limitless, timeslots in the cardiac Cath Lab to do fluoroscopic contrast studies on anybody and everybody – there are not enough cardiologists, not enough, OR support staff, insurance companies already deny a huge number of medical claims that are absolutely necessary for patients, and non-reimbursed procedures will be passed directly onto other patients when they receive a $40 Tylenol for a headache, to offset the losses encourage by non-reimbursed procedures, and testing for other patients.

Currently, there are not enough physicians, there are not enough nurses, there is not enough staff for operating rooms, and patients (as well as many hospitals) are getting financially squeezed by insurance companies

I’m not saying this is how things should be, I’m just saying how things are.