Once Statin drugs were so safe doctors told us that everyone, ill or not, should take them! Now the advice patients are given is so conflicting it is probably safer not to prove it - either way.
The problem with Statin drugs is that their safety has always been questioned. This does not deter pharmaceutical medicine from telling us they are ‘safe and effective’, and patients who take them, and suffering side effects, regularly disagreeing.
Once, conventional medicine told us that Statins were so effective in preventing heart disease, and so entirely safe, that even fit and healthy people should take them. This was the starting point for Statins. Soon the evidence from patients was challenging this from personal experience. As usual the medical profession ignored, minimised or discounted the concerns: the benefits outweighed the harm, et al - the usual defences were trotted out.
Over a decade later the safety of Statin drugs is still being hotly disputed. Recently a study, reported here by Medscape, found that there was “Good news for patients worried about Statin side effects”; they “most never happen”.
“Patients worried about potential side effects of statins can rest easy, according to a new large-scale study: The vast majority of adverse effects listed on statin medications simply never occur. The study, published in The Lancet, analyzed individual patient data from 154,000 patients in 23 large, randomized controlled trials conducted by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration. Researchers compiled 66 non-muscle, non-diabetes outcomes that statin labels claim may be caused by these drugs — including cognitive problems, depression, sleep issues, kidney injury, sexual dysfunction, liver disease, and many others”.
So nothing to worry about then? Well, Dr. Wojak’s recent article on Substack fundamentally disagrees. He stated that “Statins are an insidious scam” that were “exposing the Cholesterol myth”, and that “any doctor still recommending statins is inexcusably ignorant or corrupt”.
In his article Dr Wojak walks us through the history of Statin drugs, and the myths about the dangers of Cholesterol, over the past 80 years or so.
“The original theory, popularized in the 1950s, blamed cholesterol as a whole. The claim was that eating saturated fat - primarily from foods like red meat, butter, eggs, and full-fat dairy - raised blood cholesterol, which in turn caused heart disease”.
“When this story failed to hold up under scrutiny, the goalposts were moved. Total cholesterol quietly faded from focus. Cholesterol was split into two different types: “good” (HDL) and “bad” (LDL), and LDL cholesterol alone was rebranded as the villain. From that point on, medical intervention targeted LDL cholesterol specifically—pushed ever lower with each new set of guidelines”.
And still, year-by-year, Statin patients continued to report serious side effects emanating from the drug.
So what is certain is that anyone who is taking Statin drugs, plus anyone who is prescribed them in the future, should read both these articles in order to make an informed choice. It is clear that patients who over decades have reported serious “side effects” have not been believed. The bland reassurances about Statin safety continues to be peddled by the Conventional Medical Establishment.
What everyone should remember is that even the bland reassurances outlined in the Medscape article is a climb-down from the position pharmaceutical medicine was taking in the early years of Statins - that they were “completely safe”, so safe, in fact, that everyone (even those who did not suffer from heart issues) should be taking them.
“Only four of the 66 undesirable outcomes attributed to statins met false discovery rate significance criteria: abnormal liver transaminases, minor urinary composition changes (mostly mild proteinuria), edema, and other liver function test abnormalities. Absolute risks for these outcomes, however, were under 0.2% annually”.
“By contrast, the authors found moderate-intensity statin use for 5 years would typically prevent about 1000 major vascular events per 10,000 patients with established cardiovascular disease and about 500 events per 10,000 high-risk patients without prior events — placing the small excess risks for adverse events in a clinical context”.
No problem there, then!
So I urge everyone to make their own decision about Statin drugs. Do you believe the millions of patients, over the last 70 years, who have reported serious harm?
Or do you believe the pharmaceutical industry, whose reputation and wealth depends on selling us drugs, and convincing us that they are safe?
The decision is for each one of us to take.
