Do I need a Heart Scan?

Everywhere in America, doctors have set up machines to screen the body. There are machines to screen your breasts, others machines to screen your lungs, others for your brain, your bones, your rectum, etc and now we have a machine to screen the heart. The heart scan is the latest device on market. With marketing ploys that frighten consumers like “you will die”, “you will get a heart attack” , “cholesterol is bad” and so on, these hyped up ads have been designed to scare consumers into thinking that death can occur any second from a heart attack.

Come-on doctors, Enough with these ads- relax, take a pill, get an enema and chill out.

What is a heart scan?

The heart scan is a technique that takes pictures of your heart and measures levels of calcium in your coronary vessels. You lie on a table, which enters a Tunnel with a camera. The camera takes pictures and in 5 minutes, it is all over- just $1,500 for this great procedure that can look at anatomy of your heart.

Physician now use heart scans to determine amount of calcium in your coronary vessels. If you have more calcium in your blood vessels, then it is bad. The higher the calcium score, the worse it is for you- at least this is what is speculated by the doctors who use heart scans.

Rather than go into mundane details, it is known that when cholesterol deposits in your blood vessels. Calcium also accumulates at the same time. Since we have no good way of measuring cholesterol deposits in a live human, the next best thing is to measure calcium levels. If the levels of calcium are high in your blood vessels, then it is bad.

The ads claims that if you have lot of calcium in your coronary vessels, you have a high risk of heart attack even if you do not have any symptoms- Such claims are bull because many people have calcium in their blood vessels and live a long healthy life without getting a heart attack.

Today, heart scans have popped up everywhere; in supermarkets, shopping centers, in every health care facility and plazas. Almost all doctors have a heart machine in their office or know of someone who has it. There are some doctors who own mobile heart scans that can come to your home.