If I speak specifically to having a heart attack, or a myocardial infarc, as we call it, having a good general assessment—and it doesn't always have to be with a family physician, it could be with a nurse practitioner or a very skilled nurse even—and going through a complete risk profile.... There are nine classic risk factors that contribute to about 95% of all heart attacks.
If somebody knows what their risks are—and sometimes they know they are out of shape, overweight, or they smoke, but sometimes they don't know what their blood pressure and cholesterol are, and you don't need a specialist like me to be able to determine those risks. If people get access to them, they can have their risks calculated, and then they can access the knowledge they need to make those changes, which are very often commonsense things.
I remember Canada's Food Guide was very helpful in telling people how to eat healthy. I think there should be a Canada health guide for how to live healthy in general, to make sure people are doing the amount of exercise they should and not smoking. Everybody hears that, and it falls on deaf ears a lot of the time because sometimes lifestyles are hard to modify. I think a basic risk assessment will help predict many heart attacks. The real challenge, I would say, is not finding out what the risk is but making people make the necessary changes so they reduce that risk.
I've been dealing with that for 20 years, and it's a struggle.