Well, Well, Well --- A few more words about statins risks

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Well, Well, Well

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A few more words about statins risks

CONNIE HOWARD / _health_ (health)

I know I just talked about this, but there’s more dying to be said.

John Carey, in the Jan 17 Business Week cover story, reports that a large,

government-funded clinical trial on

cholesterol-lowering medications showed no statistically significant

reduction in mortality risk at all.

 

There’s more. Experts like Dr Rodney A Hayward, professor of internal

medicine at the University of Michigan, are now saying that current evidence

supports ignoring LDL cholesterol completely when assessing heart disease risk.

 

Even Pfizer’s own numbers (with the help of a little math by John Carey)

tell us that for 99 out of 100 people taking Lipitor there is no measurable

benefit—and that’s based on an industry-sponsored trial, one which used

carefully selected patients with multiple risk factors, which likely explains

the

findings of the government study showing no significant benefit at all.

 

Though this is huge—and hugely upsetting—to some, it isn’t really new;

it’

s just now making mainstream news more often. Plenty of research over the

years has, believe it or not, drawn similar conclusions: statins offer no

benefit in anyone over the age of 65 no matter how much their cholesterol goes

down; lower total cholesterol actually becomes a health risk after the age of

50;

statins show no benefit in women of any age who haven’t already had a heart

attack, and only “somewhat†of a benefit in those who have (one which,

given

the package of risks statins come with, would be a questionable one at best).

 

Yet for years we’ve been handed statins like they’re a god-send. Isn’t

the

industry misleading the public and the health professionals looking after us

by fudging the truth unethical and immoral?

 

Those of us that have dared suggest there is more to heart disease than high

cholesterol, or that the risks of statins outweigh any possible benefits,

have often swallowed accusations of being alarmist, flakey or irresponsible by

those who still hold that conventional medical advice is the only kind based

on trustworthy science.

 

 

To these people I say objectivity in science is a bit of a myth—far too much

done in the name of science is actually skewed in favour of profits. And

when information trickles out either too obtuse for most of us to make sense

of,

or too little and too late, the trustworthiness of the entire industry

behind modern medicine must be called into question. It is, after all, our

health

we’re paying with.

 

And to those always eager to inform me that the difference between medical

bunk and real medicine is that “real†(read Western) medical treatments

have

been confirmed to work by scientific testing and retesting I say, “Excuse

me?â€

 

I’m not opposed to western medicine; it sometimes preserves our lives and

our sanity. What I’m opposed to is obfuscation by those interested in selling

their product, and health reporters being either too busy to investigate or

being silenced by corporatism. What I’m opposed to is putting medical

orthodoxy

on a pedestal that doesn’t permit questioning, and doctors getting their

information on medications from the makers of those medications. Because not

only does western medicine save lives, it also all too often ruins them.

 

But despite all the obfuscation and silencing going on, many of us have long

known that statins are not the answer to what ails our hearts. The picture

is almost always bigger than any single factor. Looking at the whole—taking

into account things like entire populations with low rates of heart disease

whatever their cholesterol or dietary fat—would’ve put us on an entirely

different research path.

 

Where statins do help, they help not so much because they successfully lower

cholesterol levels, but very likely because they also reduce inflammation,

which is a somewhat different problem, and one that so-called unproven

alternative approaches specialize in.

 

The sad victory of those bent on convincing us that alternative ways of

achieving heart health are ineffective is that too many of our mothers and

fathers now have, thanks to the supposedly life-saving statins, experienced

Alzheimer-like memory losses, muscle losses significant enough to make walking

past

the mailbox a chore, and feeling young and amorous a very dim memory.

 

Yet, almost unbelievably, some (swine's in the pharmaceutical arena) are

still calling for wider use of statins.