Bill Sardi Health Blog
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Gamed
07-01-2016 by Bill Sardi
Butter does not increase the risk for heart disease. [Tech Times; PLoS One] This 180-degree turn in dietary advice does not emanate from a new discovery but actually was gleaned from analyses of prior studies that date back over a decade, which says nobody cared to tell the public till now. Science contrary to dietary dogma just isn’t being reported.
Another recently published report indicates millions of people may be needlessly taking statin drugs every day and “blanket” prescriptions for adults at risk for mortal heart attacks are not warranted. In yet another massive scientific U-turn, one report even found 92% of people with elevated cholesterol actually lived longer! [Telegraph UK; BMJ Open] The British Medical Journal report is also a retrospective review of prior studies dating back over two decades. Modern medicine has been misleading the public for a long time now.
It took investigative journalist Nina Techolz to take modern medicine to task, in particular dieticians, for what has to be the biggest misdirection in the history of medicine – to avoid fats and consume sugar and carbohydrates. [The Big Fat Surprise] Kat James, noted author, talked about needless fat phobia and the downsides of a carbohydrate-rich diet (pasta, cereal, rice, bread) over a decade ago. [Amazon.com] Dr. Ron Rosedale [The Rosedale Diet] and Kat James were lone voices about the health consequences of sugar and carbs at the time.
Public health agencies were complicit in all this, issuing their infamous Food Pyramid that promoted carbohydrates as the basis of a healthy diet. As retired medical practitioner Richard B. Hawkes said: “There is a lot of evidence to show that the obesity epidemic, with all the other diseases associated with it, is mainly as a result of following that ‘fateful’ Food Pyramid.” [British Medical Journal]
Hospital dieticians are slow to change the meals they offer their in-patients based on this new science. After all, those sugary, carbohydrate-rich meals have ensured hospitals will have an endless line of sicker and sicker patients.
Who is going to confess an intentional misdirection has been perpetrated on the American public so the medical industry could profiteer off of an unwary public? Nobody is going to up and admit all this unhealthy dietary advice was intentionally dispensed to increase the amount of disease in need of treatment.
Deeply rooted cholesterol phobia
Will this information roust up public outrage? That’s not likely because cholesterol-phobia is so deeply rooted in the population that may take decades to undo it all.
Did statin drug users spit out their Lipitor pills and write angry letters to their cardiologists upon publication of these revelations? No.
Has there been any health authority or attorneys general put statin drug company executives in jail or demand payment of fines for promotion of drugs that allegedly prevent mortal heart attacks without an iota of scientific substantiation? In fact, state attorneys general chose to target dietary supplement companies instead. [Natural Products Insider]
Short of God coming down out of the sky to put a stop to it all, the practice of medicine will proceed in a business-as-usual fashion.
Deeper investigation
But the question as to why patients mindlessly continue to take statin drugs is worthy of a bit deeper investigation.
First, if you can imagine, there are patients who both smoke cigarettes and take a statin drug. While one would think at if they can’t stop smoking, patients should at least take a statin drug to counter tobacco’s effects, the science says otherwise. Smokers who use statin drugs actually have a 60% increased risk for lung abnormalities. [Med Page Today; American Journal Respiratory Critical Care Medicine]
Ironically, side effects from statin drugs (muscle aches, memory problems, others) force many patients to stop taking them, not the inability of these drugs to deliver on their promise to reduce the risk for mortal heart attacks.
God knows how much money the pharmaceutical companies would have made had they formulated a pill that lowers cholesterol without all the side effects. (To learn of one medicine that did lower cholesterol without side effects, see the last paragraph of this report.)
One study showed 40-70% of patients doubt the necessity or lacked knowledge about the effectiveness of statins. [PLoS One] Another study ranks the primary reasons patients do not comply with doctors’ orders to take statins are side effects (muscle pain) 60%, cost 16% and lack of effectiveness 13%. [Journal Clinical Lipidology]
A survey showed patients are more likely not to fill a prescription for a statin drug if it costs more than ten dollars out of pocket. So insurance companies were persuaded, for public health reasons they said, to drop the co-payment on statin drugs to no more than ~$10. [American Journal Managed Care]
However we still have billions of dollars of statin drugs being sold. A crash of the pharmaceutical sector of the stock market might result if every statin drug user caught on to this ruse. We couldn’t have that.
Why patients stick with statins
The fear of death is certainly a motivator for patients to take statins. Fear sells. But there is a deeper-seated mindset behind all this. The mindset is that we live in an interdependent world where we rely upon others, in this case doctors, to make complicated decisions for us.
We find a more pervasive vulnerability in the American mind, cultured by what is not taught in school. In America we simply do not teach independent decision-making.
Freedom of choice unutilized
Employers often have great difficulty teaching workers and managers to solve problems on their own. Throughout our lives, we rely upon school administrators, bankers, employers, the military, doctors, financial counselors, priests and pastors, and of course government, to make decisions for us.
It is possible to go through life in America never having made an important decision about anything – choice of religion (family made that choice), where to invest money (employers, government made that choice), what vocational track to follow (the army or family made that choice) or medicines to take (doctors made that choice), during one’s lifetime. I often see grown men whose nurturing spouse makes all the important decisions for them, particularly about money and health.
You may never know if statin drugs saved your life
If you go to the auto repair shop with a car that won’t start and the mechanic says you need a new battery and you drive it home and find the car doesn’t start the next day and the mechanic says it now needs a new alternator, you should be miffed. He needlessly sold you a battery. But when you take a worthless statin drug and you drop dead of a heart attack, nobody is held accountable for that dire outcome. The patient can’t complain from the grave.
Statin cholesterol-lowering drugs are categorically inappropriate. Drop-dead sudden mortal heart attacks which comprise up to 70% of all heart stoppages aren’t caused by arteries narrowed by cholesterol plaque but rather by an electrical storm in the heart. [Circulation] Cholesterol drugs prevent 1 non-mortal heart attack in 70 high-risk (3%) and 1 in 200 healthy adults (0.5%) over a 5-year period while they induce side effects in 17% of users. [Bloomberg News; NPR]
One “drug” that did work
If you are a hardened cholesterol-phobe and you just have to get your cholesterol numbers down, you might be interested to learn it was Slovakian researcher Emil Ginter in the 1970s-1980s who showed that the production of cholesterol by the liver did not have to be reduced by use of liver-toxic statin drugs. In fact, cholesterol is essential for life — to make sex hormones and transport fat-soluble antioxidants like vitamin E and lutein in the blood circulation.
Ginter showed a simple combination of apple pectin and vitamin C improved bile flow, which facilitated the disposal of cholesterol. [International Journal Vitamin Nutrition Research 1979; International Journal Vitamin Nutrition Research 1982; Cor Vasa 1992]
But recommendations to take vitamin C don’t bring patients back to doctors’ office for prescription renewals. Nor do doctors get to bill for a drug consultation fee when they prescribe vitamins. Self-interest drives the practice of medicine, not science.
Doctors keep prescribing
It’s been said that doctors’ prescription habits are determined by drug company gifts. [Reuters] The Physician Financial Transparency Reports (Sunshine Act), that requires drug manufacturers to report payments and other transfers of value, was supposed to halt all this and let science sway doctors prescribing habits. [American Medical Assn.]
But in the face of all these revelation about statin drugs, in past decade, recommendations to take statin drugs via practice guidelines have tripled! [Health Impact News] As sales of statin drugs are fall [Drugs.com], cardiologists issue warnings that patients who stop taking their statin drugs could have mortal consequences. [The Independent].
Despite all what has been revealed about statin drugs, an editorial in a major medical journal takes the news media to task for putting patients lives at risk for having aired the controversy. [British Medical Journal 2016]
One newspaper headline claimed that “statin drugs do not have major side effects” just days after another newspaper issued a headlined report that read “million face terrible side effects as (statin) prescription escalates.” [British Medical Journal 2016] Modern medicine and the news media have become two-headed monsters, arguing back and forth over the statin drug issue, with patients’ lives in the balance.
When will the public realize they are being gamed?
And the beat goes on, as they say.
– ©2016 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.
The News Headline You Will Never Read
FDA DECLARES STATIN DRUGS A FRAUD;
STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL DEMAND FINES, JAIL TIME.
Millions of lives lost