Monday 22 August 2016

Cholesterol, Medical Science, RCT's and Statin Drugs

Cholesterol? Now, lets get this right! Medical science, and our doctors of course, have been telling us for decades that cholesterol is bad for us, and that if we have high cholesterol, we need to take pharmaceutical drugs to reduce it. 

Well, this was the original basis for the rise and rise in the prescription of Statin drugs.  That is why millions of patients throughout the world now take them regularly. That is why most patients who go to see their doctor are tested for their cholesterol levels. And if that reading is deemed to be too high we are put on Statins in order to prevent heart attacks and stroke. Statins, of course, are completely safe!

Then, as I recall, the message changed. We were told by medical science that there were two types of cholesterol, one good and other bad. Obviously, we needed the good stuff. But we did not need the bad stuff.

Simple? Well, it's not quite that simple!

It was then discovered that by reducing the 'bad' stuff, we were in danger of suffering dementia, because our brains actually needed it. For more information on this, click here. 

So bad cholesterol isn't bad at all, it is actually good! It keeps our minds active and in good order. And by seeking to lower it through Statins drugs is now linked to dementia (which, of course, is running at epidemic levels). Anything to do with Statins? Of course not! The pharmaceutical companies, and our doctors strenuously deny this. The always do, of course, and they will continue to prescribe the drugs ragardless of the dangers.

Yet there is always good cholesterol. Isn't there? Well, no, not really! We have now been told, by another study undertaken by 'medical science', that "high levels of 'good' cholesterol may not be good for us after all. The study, involving 1,764,986 men, suggests that the relationship between HDL cholesterol and death is not so straightforward - that both too little and too much of the 'good' stuff increases our chances of dying!

So let's try to be clear about what medical science is telling us!
  • that good cholesterol is bad! 
  • that bad cholesterol is good! 
Now, we really should try hard not to be too confused about this! Yet the conventional medical establishment does appear to be somewhat confused, and divided. Recently, NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) in Britain, wanted our doctors to prescribe Statin drugs to lots more people, with a much lower risk of heart attack or stroke. But doctors did not want to do this, presumably because they knew something about the risks of Statins - even though they have told us, hitherto, that they were entirely safe!

So if conventional medicine is confused, what about patients? Well, thankfully, we patients are not confused at all! After all, no one ever tells us anything about the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs, so if doctors prescribe them, we just take them, believing them to be safe, and accepting any side-effects there might be. Whatever happens to us, however alarming it might be, is nothing to do with the drugs we are taking, it just the result of  'bad luck'! 

More reassuring, of course, is that if the side effect is that we get dementia we will never get to know about it anyway!

Clarity is possible, but only if, when analysing all this important scientific and medical information, we bear in mind the following understandings.
  1. Medical science is based on RCT (Randomised Controlled Tests), an important feature of which is that the test results can be anything you want them to be. So if you pay for them (as pharmaceutical companies do) they can get whatever results they want!
  2. RCT testing has been the technique that medical science has used to prove that every pharmaceutical drug and vaccine, since Thalidomide, is both effective and safe. Unfortunately not a single drug or vaccine has ultimately been found to be safe, in the real world. Despite this medical scientists still says that RCT's are 'the gold standard'. Perhaps what they mean is that RCT drug testing leads to pots of gold for the pharmaceutical companies, a fact that is hard to deny!
  3. The link between heart attacks, strokes and cholesterol has long been known to be false, even by medical science. Conventional medicine does not tell us this though. After all, it is a business, and they want to continue selling pharmaceutical drugs.
So if you have been told that you are at risk of heart attack or stroke, if your cholesterol readings are high, if you are taking Statin drugs, you might want to look at some of the information you are not being told. I have written about the Statin - Cholesterol debacle on many occasions. Here are just some of the links to my previous blogs.
Nobody should be taking Statins, or any other pharmaceutical drug or vaccine, without being fully informed about the harm they can cause - their 'side effects'. The conventional medical establishment, including our doctors, have consistently failed to do so. Therefore it is difficult, if not impossible for patients to make a fully informed choice about whether to take the drugs prescribed to them, or to refuse them.

The confusion about cholesterol demonstrates something even more alarming. The conventional medical establishment, itself, is in a state of total and utter confusion! Medical science, and the RCT's on which it is based, are at the heart of this confusion. RCT's can prove anything and everything about anything and everything so only confusion will result. And that is what we are dealing with here.

Conventional medicine is totally and utterly confused!