Monday, June 28, 2010

Statins, Pregnancy, Sepsis, Cancer, Heart Failure: a Critical Analysis:

Over the last few decades, the American pharmaceutical industry (henceforth, "Big Pharma") has applied a very successful formula to market fear and convert it into a multi-billion dollar industry. The algorithm goes like this:
  1. find a substance whose concentration can be measured cheaply
  2. find a prevalent disease whose presence correlates with a high concentration of that substance
  3. find a drug that reduces the concentration of that substance
  4. advertise aggressively to the general public and medical professionals, claiming a miracle cure.
In a substitution of variables, the substance is cholesterol, the disease is heart disease, and the drug is Lipitor, and, voila! Through aggressive advertising campaigns, Big Pharma has managed to convince the American public and the American doctors that statin drugs are the best thing since sliced bread.

But are they right? I think the evidence shows that very few people currently taking statin drugs are actually benefiting from them. Furthermore, many of them are actually worse off than they would have been had they never been on statins. Below, I will argue that any benefits incurred in combating heart disease are more than offset by increased susceptibility to fetal damage, toxic infection, and cancer.

...
Essentially, by taking a statin, you are shifting the odds on what you die of. Pay the money, suffer the side effects, and as a result you may end up dying of cancer or a runaway infection before you would have died of heart disease if you had never taken the drug in the first place.
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Read the full article by
Dr.Stephanie Seneff, a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here.

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