This is arterial plaque. If your HDL is low, you are more likely to have unstable arterial plaques than if your LDL is high.
This is arterial plaque. If your HDL is low, you are more likely to have unstable arterial plaques than if your LDL is high.
Today it happened again. I saw another patient who, except for a little bit of extra weight, was healthy until she was diagnosed with high total cholesterol levels.
“You’ve got to do something” they told her.
She got the usual advice: Cut butter, eggs, red meat and cheese. But cutting dietary cholesterol didn’t work, and on the next test, the cholesterol level was even higher. Afraid for her life, she asked what else she could do. No surprise, they put her on a statin: Crestor. And on the next test her total cholesterol was lower and everyone was happy. But the glow didn’t last.
She steadily gained more weight until she grew into the obese category on the BMI chart. Worse, three years after starting Crestor, her glucose levels rose to the point where she had developed early diabetes (a known side effect of Crestor and presumably other statins since the 2008 Jupiter study). Once in early diabetes, more struggles with weight, and new problems such as joint pains, nerve problems, and hypertension are on their way. Continue reading →
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Posted in: cholesterol, cholesterol pills, saturated fat, weight loss.
Tagged: high carb diet · high cholesterol · low carb diet · treatment for high cholesterol
Why is this man smiling?
If you’ve ever lived with someone suffering from the horrible effects of Alzheimer’s, you know that you’d do almost anything to stop this disease in its tracks. If you’ve been spared that experience, take a look at Nancy Reagan’s face at her husband’s funeral. That’s the look of somebody who has acted as caretaker for a man who was at one time the most powerful person in the free world, and then, not such a long time later, wasn’t entirely sure where, or who, he was.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the drugs that promise to effectively treat this disease actually worked?
As a doctor familiar with Alzheimer’s and its effects on families, I’m sad to say that they don’t. At least not very well. The drugs we have, though widely advertised, are little more effective than placebo, and for this reason some doctors no longer prescribe them. In fact, in a recent independently funded study, Dr. Richard Grey concluded Aricept, the most popular drug in the class of Alzheimer’s treatments, was “worthless.”
Why don’t Alzheimer’s drugs work?
Continue reading →
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Posted in: dementia, life extension, medical corruption.
Tagged: alzheimer's drugs worthless · diagnosing alzheimer's · medications to treat alzheimers · preventing alzheimer's disease
When I first saw those helicopter shots of red oil plumes staining the ocean, my only thought was: How could any animal survive in that? As a person who loves animals, this tragedy is too awful to think about. But as a doctor concerned with the prevention of human illness, I can’t help thinking about it. I can’t help but wonder: If the entire Gulf ecosystem is trashed, how will that affect us?
It’s impossible to measure, let alone predict, the long-term human health effects that emerge from a major environmental catastrophe like the one we are now witnessing in the Gulf. The ripple effects from the near-complete destruction of a vast and unique ecosystem will continue to spread for decades. The ramifications of such a disaster are complicated enough, so here I’ll just focus on the effect of the Gulf spill on brain health.
Here’s what I predict.
Continue reading →
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Posted in: Uncategorized.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on the web about doctors getting free lunches from pharmaceutical companies as an explanation for why we hand out so many prescriptions. I don’t actually know anyone in my group of 30 or so doctors who sees drug reps anymore. The programming by we are influenced these days is much harder for our patients to see—even reporters seem not to know to write about it. It’s called “Pay for Performance,” or P4P.
P4P is exactly what it sounds like it is: Insurance companies pay us more if we write more prescriptions and order more tests. Continue reading →
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Posted in: Healthcare Reform, cholesterol, medical corruption.
Tagged: healthcare reform · p4p · pay for performance · quality measures
Medical Ethicist Dr. Steven D. Pearson says definitely not.
Pearson’s opinions help shape policies that become written into law. His mission: To reduce variation in physician behavior. He believes medical care will be better, safer, and more cost-efficient when physicians base clinical judgments on “solid empirical science instead of clinical observation and experience.”
Dr. Pearson’s word choice is key to understanding where he’s coming from—and how your doctor may be required to treat you at your next appointment. Notice, Pearson uses the term “instead of” as if suggesting solid empirical science and personal experience are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled. His assumption seems to be that the average physician is incapable of safely assimilating new experiences.
Conformity is Safety
According to Dr. Pearson, all doctors should treat people with the same diagnosis—say high cholesterol, or cancer—the same way, and their treatment plans should be based entirely on published protocols and guidelines. Continue reading →
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Posted in: Healthcare Reform, How Doctor's Think, cholesterol, medical corruption.
Tagged: conflicts of interest · consensus panels · Dr. Steven Pearson · healthcare reform · pay for performance
Your thyroid gland sits in your neck right under the voicebox
I listened to an archived podcast of Brown University Medical School’s Radiology dept. chief Dr. John J Cronan on ReachMD radio this morning and was pleasantly surprised to hear yet another doctor suggesting that cancer is something our bodies can, and do, defeat more often than we realize.
He was discussing a subtype of cancer called Papillary cancer. There are a few other kinds of thyroid cancer but this is far and away the most common. So common, in fact, that nearly 4 out of 10 adults walking around probably have it.
Continue reading →
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Posted in: How Doctor's Think, cancer, life extension.
Tagged: biopsy · Dr. Cronan · papillary thyroid cancer · regression · surgery · ultrasound
