Statins, Cholesterol, and Everything
Is lowering cholesterol really as important as everybody has been saying for all these years? Or has it (after all) been overblown hype, inflicted upon the unsuspecting populace by the evil pharmaceutical companies and their conflicted-by-honoraria-and-grants physician-minions?
This fine new controversy promises to require some years to sort itself out. In the meantime, many physicians and patients find themselves newly adrift. After all, many of us need to make decisions now about whether to take the pains (and the expense) necessary to bring down our cholesterol levels. If we guess wrongly, we risk our money and/or our lives.
Fortunately, the situation is manageable. We actually know quite a lot about when it is and is not necessary to become aggressive about reducing cholesterol, and specifically, when it is necessary to take statins. Click here for a discussion of statins, cholesterol, and everything.
And in the meantime, look on the bright side. Sure, the firmament has moved, causing in us the same feeling of dislocation no doubt experienced by the literate minority who first read the works of Galileo. But at the same time we've been spared - apparently forever - those annoying TV commercials comparing your flamboyant Aunt Tilda to a plate of assorted petit fours.
Comments
In your article “Statins, Cholesterol, and Everything,” you raise very important questions that anyone concerned with cholesterol-control should consider.
Very interesting relevant articles are posted on http://www.cholesterolscore.com See the article “Guess Who’s Educating Your Doctor?” by Tara Parker-Pope, and “Is the niacin-toxicity fear overblown?” and “Niacin: Myths and Facts” by Dr. William Davis, and “Fact or Factoid? The Niacin-Danger Case” by Abram Hoffer MD PhD
There have been studies telling us this since the late ’60s, when triparanol was removed from the market for doing pretty much what the present statins do. Then there were studies in the 90s showing cholesterol lowering didn’t have anything to do with cardiovascular disease. However, physicians have preferred to get their drugs information from gifts, consultation fee and appointment bearing pharmaceutical companies. The word has been there, in double blind randomized style. You’ve just ignored it because it wasn’t shilled.
I recall posting some of the factual questioning statin studies HERE; by Beatrice Golomb M.D. PhD of the $5 million NIH funded study into statin side effects.
You didn’t even peep.
This is really confusing.
We can’t keep having different researches every day telling us different things. From the way I look at this, I received a very detailed explanation from my doctor about how cholesterol affects heart diseases and in this article I didn’t receive any real information about why it doesn’t have any affect about it.
For many years doctors pushed hormone replacement therapy. Then we heard, from those same doctors, how questionable hormone replacement can be. In later years I gave in to statin use after years of being warned by doctors that high cholesterol is a killer. The drug companies had done their studies, and I believed that doctors actually knew for a fact that statins were the answer to my so-called inherited high cholesterol. Yet now we’re being told something entirely different? If doctors aren’t actually certain of the good or the harm a treatment might do a patient, how can they, in good conscience, be so careless with someone else’s health,someone who trusts them? The answer is they do it because they can, and because it’s profitable. Wouldn’t it be better to tell the patient both sides–that a particular drug might or might not work for him or her? But they usually don’t. And we’d never accept that kind of guesswork from a mechanic who came back later and admitted that the expensive parts he had sold us to “fix” our vehicle didn’t actually fix anything and might even do harm to the car. Said he’d heard it was a good idea but it turned out to be the opposite. Would you trust him to work on your car again? Would you demand a refund? If it had harmed your vehicle, would you sue?Thing is, we can always get another car–we can’t always undo the harm done by medical mistakes and costly snake oil treatments. So my question is . . . Now what?