Medicate everyone, why not?
About 15 million more people in England could be prescribed daily cholesterol-lowering statin pills to cut their risk of heart attacks and stroke, new advice for the NHS says.
Given the very cheap price of the tablets and the possible health gains, they should be considered more often, the draft guidance says.
My GP tried to get me to take satins when routine blood test showed slightly elevated cholesterol. I declined.
There can be side effects though.
Damned right there are and they are well known. If there is no other option and the individual has balanced the relevant risks, then fine, but there is no need for them to be widely prescribed, because there are perfectly safe options for managing cholesterol that doesn’t involve filling the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies.
Just as a follow up to that, I started using plant stanols and the next time I had a blood test, the cholesterol level had dropped to acceptable levels. Not a statin to be seen.
My doctor and I used to play a game before he retired, he’d give me a prescription for a cholesterol test and I’d put it in the bin on my way out.
The argument for statins is based on the number of deaths/heart attacks they are supposed to prevent.
Any deaths that occur as a result of statin prescription are not recorded as such and therefore do not appear in the risk calculations.My father, prescribed statins on the basis of a rise in cholesterol (not elevated, just higher than his previous low reading), had increasingly severe symptoms dismissed as statin side effects until, some years later, a second opinion – obtained in the face of strong opposition from the practice – confirmed that he actually had advanced and by then inoperable cancer.
I’m sure he can’t be the only one for whom the statins masked a serious and unrelated condition which led to his death. With a horrible irony, his heart turned out to have been in perfect condition and his cardiovascular fitness excellent for his age.
If you’ll forgive the link, I looked at the statistics a few years ago: https://newgatenews.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-needs-of-many.html
My quack of the time put me on statins about twenty years ago and I developed the virtually standard joint pains so I stopped them. About twelve years ago I developed rheumatoid arthritis, but had the statins been involved as well as genetics? We’ll never know.