Very bad news about statins....Today's post:  Tuesday, 8-7-2018

Heart attacks and strokes are quite common and cause high medical expenses and suffering and even disruption of important work when a person doing it dies suddenly of a heart attack or a stroke.

So, understandably doctors want to do more to help their patients prevent them.

Some doctors know that the most effective way to do this is to have people stop the causes including smoking and being totally sedentary and eating too much sugar and hydrogenated oils.

Some even know how to help people get into exercise programs.

But those same doctors are very pressed for time and often their patients don’t take this kind of lifestyle upgrade advice.  Doctors have not been trained to be lifestyle upgrade coaches.  Mercifully some are somewhat effective.

So, since most doctors still believe statins prevent heart attacks effectively, they believe it’s important to get their at risk patients to take them.

The statin providing companies, I just found out, are using this to help such doctors talk a bigger percentage of their patients into beginning or staying on statins.

The reality is that statins are so ineffective & harmful that it’s questionable if they should be legal to prescribe at all!

Most doctors do not know that statins offer close to zero protection to about two thirds of the people with the majority genetic makeup and weak protection to the other third.

In my opinion, prescribing statins to anyone who hasn’t had the relatively inexpensive test to see if they are even in the one third who might get some benefit is not acceptable.

To be fair, the benefit of statins to the somewhat helped one third is so weak and the harms of statins are so great, the better solution is to use more effective ways to protect against heart attack and strokes and not use statins at all!

Statins have four effects.  Two help but are more effectively done in other ways.  And two of the effects CAUSE heart disease!

1.  Small particle LDL tends to cause cardiovascular disease and to some extent reducing total LDL lowers those.  Statins do that to some degree. 

But more protective things do it more directly and protect in other ways that statins do not!  Exercise, niacin, and completely eliminating the intake of hydrogenated oils reduce small particle LDL directly.

2.  Statins lower inflammation which is protective.

  

But more protective things do it more directly and protect in other ways that statins do not! 

The book AntiCancer a New Way of Life lists most of those.  Each part of the protocol it lists is more heart and stroke protective than statins.  Best of all, following them lowers excessive chronic inflammation like throwing a light switch.  It’s very effective.

3.  A study found statins caused calcium deposits on the inside of the coronary arteries. 

That baffled me when I read it.  Since then I’ve discovered that vitamin K2 has the reverse effect and removes calcium from the blood vessels and directs it to build bones instead AND statins deplete vitamin K2.  This statin effect causes heart attacks and strokes and high blood pressure.

4.  Statin drugs deplete the body of the ubiquinol form of CoQ10 that keep the mitochondria healthy. 

Besides a long list of harmful effects and effects that reduce the quality of life of the people taking statins, this has three horrible effects:

a) It weakens the heart and contributes to causing heart failure.

b) And, because the more harmful effects of bad diabetes are caused by mitochondrial damage, this means that statins are strongly contraindicated for anyone with any level of diabetes! 

The news on statins could hardly be worse.

But it is.

Statins also cause insomnia that is almost impossible to stop without discontinuing the statins.

Statins cause more cataracts than they reduce heart attacks.

They cause migraines which are an indication of vascular problems.

c) But worst of all, they make the exercises that would otherwise be most heart protective harmful to do! 

If you take statins, particularly the stronger ones, the more effectively you exercise, the more harm you do to your heart and other muscles.

This is often permanent and can be fatal.

A new study finds that taking statins at least doubles this risk overall:

The email I got from HSI this last Monday, 8-6 had this:

“Dear Reader,

At Penn Medicine, it's called the "nudge unit" -- and it's where researchers are assigned with coming up with innovative ways to "steer medical decision-making." 

When it comes to statins, however, it's less like a gentle push... and more like a shove off a cliff!

The whole idea of how to get more doctors to whip out statin prescriptions as if they're Post-It Notes is being studied up, down, and all around -- and the latest approach has found a way to triple statin prescribing. 

And almost precisely as this new method of selling statins is making the rounds, another study has come out about these drugs -- one that would be a whole lot more important for doctors to be nudged about.

It turns out that a so-called "rare" muscle disorder, one that can permanently disable you, is twice as likely to occur in people popping these cholesterol-lowering meds.

If you're currently taking one of these drugs... or your doctor is prodding you to do so... you need to know about this eye-opening study right now.

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Putting the lid on Lipitor
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The latest plan to sell statin drugs is coming from researchers at Penn Medicine, who found that by "nudging" docs with a variety of online methods, they could get them to write three times as many statin prescriptions.

Some of the tactics include sending emails listing their "eligible" statin patients (pulled off of a patient's "dashboard") and even comparing how many of these meds they prescribe versus how their colleagues have scored in the statin statistics game. 

It's almost as if there's a prize for the doc who sends the most patients out the door with a Lipitor or Crestor Rx!

But here's something that's much more important that all physicians need to know about.

A new study from researchers at Australia's University of Adelaide found that those taking these meds were twice as likely to suffer from an excruciatingly painful muscle condition called "inflammatory myositis." 

Now, the statin connection to muscle pain probably sounds familiar to you. Perhaps you even suffered from it yourself after taking one of these drugs (After all, it's one of the most common complaints doctors hear about them).

But for years, such reactions were ignored and treated as if people were simply imagining them. At this point, however, it's pretty much common knowledge that they occur, although the treatment is usually to simply switch your statin brand or tell you to just grimace and bear it.

And that's what makes this new research such a bombshell. 

While we've been told that statin-associated muscle pain will stop when the drug is discontinued, that's not always the case. The Aussies found that these meds can double the chances of suffering a type of muscle damage that may never go away. 

In fact, it can even escalate to an autoimmune disease that requires the use of horribly dangerous immunosuppressive drugs to keep it under control.

The researchers made it a point to warn that doctors should be paying close attention to any patient with a complaint of muscle weakness or pain and "consider the possibility of inflammatory myositis." 

That's certainly a far cry from saying it's all in your head!

And while those Penn pharma shills are burning the midnight oil to keep the statins moving, others experts are saying that it may be time to put a lid on the Lipitor.

Last year, I told you about a group of doctors from the U.S., France, Ireland, and the U.K. that published an exposé about how we've been conned about the benefits of statin drugs from the get-go. 

One of those researchers summarized the findings by saying that we've had decades of "misinformation on cholesterol" along with the "gross exaggeration of statin benefits."

Look, we already know that statin drugs can cause liver damage, Parkinson's disease, and hardening of the arteries -- not to mention new-onset diabetes in perfectly healthy people.

Adding a disabling muscle condition to the list is simply the icing on the cake.

So, if your doctor starts nudging you about taking a statin, push back with some of these facts and let him know that you won't be putting your health on the line so he can keep his prescription numbers up to par.

And if you're currently taking a statin and suffering from any degree of muscle pain or weakness, take a leaf from what those Australian researchers are saying and don't dismiss it. 

Continuing to soldier on through the pain while popping a statin every day could be one of the worst mistakes you'll ever make.

Be sure to open your eAlert tomorrow morning, when Dr. Spreen tells how drug industry propaganda can influence your doc into prescribing you a statin to prevent heart disease -- despite the fact that cholesterol isn't even the cause of most heart problems. 

Stay tuned!

To Knowing the Whole Story,

Melissa Young “