He found no benefit in people over the age of 65, no matter how much their cholesterol declines, and no benefit in women of any age. He did see a small reduction in the number of heart attacks for middle-aged men taking statins in clinical trials. But even for these men, there was no overall reduction in total deaths or illnesses requiring hospitalization—despite big reductions in “bad” cholesterol.
When I hear a drug doesn’t work that well, I usually assume it doesn’t do what it is supposed to. But that is not the case for Statin. The issue is the theory itself: what the drug does successfully isn’t really as significant as has been assumed.
Back in the 90’s I heard a contrarian doctor compare the current views of cholestoral to doing a study that discovered that tall people had longer pant legs and then suggesting they could be made shorter by cutting three inches off the bottom of their pants.
Almost 20 years ago, one of the great scientists of the 20th century developed a new theory of what causes heart disease. He also patented a cure which involves the use of simple and inexpensive nutrients. Get the details here…
I’ve heard inklings of this sort of thing before — that high cholesterol levels in older people are not as highly associated with morbidity as in younger people. It suggests that if you’re young and have high cholesterol, something is wrong, but if you’re older, that’s not only normal, but relatively harmless. Maybe the high cholesterol in younger people is an indicator, not a cause.
Sometimes I wish there was a way we curious lay people could get a hold of medical researchers and ask them to study this or that angle. As it is, we’re stuck with the things they’ve decided to study, the way they’ve decided to study them, and left with only our common sense and apparent deductive conclusions about things outside that realm. That kind of common sense deduction has some value, but can also turn out to be flawed in practice. So it would be nice if there were a way to study some of the questions us average folks have about things.
Pentamom,
The Pauling Therapy is inexpensive and consists of harmless nutritional supplements. There are plenty of testimonials of it’s effectiveness.
Thanks for the articles Mark & Bobber. This is good information to have on hand for someone near & dear.
Therapy for what? I thought we hadn’t even decided what the problem was, yet. Isn’t that the point?
Pentamom,
Therapy for heart disease.