Comments on: Does Every Diabetic Really Need A Cholesterol Pill?

By: catey

catey — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 05:27:35 +0000

Hi Josephine

The group I belong to is affected by HMSA’s program that withholds pay from doctors who fail to prescribe statins to men or women who carry a diagnosis of coronary artery disease. I don’t like it one bit. But fortunately I only have one patient affected by the plan. This current arrangement is not as much of a threat to patient health or physician sanity as the plan they wanted to implement as of the summer of ’08, which would have required all patients who carry a diagnosis of diabetes to be on statins, or their physicians face penalties.

Thank you for your thoughtful comments!

By: Josephine Keliipio

Josephine Keliipio — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 08:58:12 +0000

It is now March 2009 and a very reliable source has recently informed me that HMSA is paying doctors bonuses if they prescribe statins to any of their patients both non-diabetic and diabetic. In addition, when doctors don’t sign up for this “bonus rewards program” and don’t prescribe statins to patients who have high cholesterol but don’t want to take drugs, HMSA still pressures them by sending them a list of patients who have high cholesterol and telling the doctors that they should be following the standard protocol. So, does following the standard protocol include coercion? or forcing doctors to force patients to take a drug with deadly side effects?

By: Josephine Keliipio

Josephine Keliipio — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:43:34 +0000

Hi Dr. Cate,
Yup, I learned from Owen of the Vitamin C Foundation that when they stop the study early it means that the results were not going in their favor. Similar to the Women’s Health Initiative where they were studying the effects of HRT and had to be stop early because either too many women were dying or coming down with cancer or heart disease. Although I am still confused about those charts, I really appreciate you pointing out that , “relative risk is a handy way to exaggerate the minimal benefit of a drug” and that “most doctors fall for the trick.” It makes me wonder how many other studies are out there for other drugs that use the “relative risk” trick in order to exaggerate their findings. I like that you also point out that if the drug were given to 100 people not one person will benefit but perhaps all will suffer from the side effects. I wonder if this is the reason why statins are mass marketed widely because the “benefit” only shows up if thousands of people are on the drug. But your last paragraph is the saddest part of all, because in the end we don’t know what happened to all those people who started out on the study and to think that HMSA is using these faulty studies to encourage wider use of a bad drug is criminal in my opinion. Shame on them. Thanks Dr. Cate for bringing awareness to this very important issue.

By: Ed Coll

Ed Coll — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:50:15 +0000

Mahalo for detailing how special interest funding dictates what research look at and what research ignore to obtain needed justification for actions to increase profit margins possibly at the risk to patient life. It is a stretch to claim such flawed studies “scientific research”.