statins – Dr. Cate

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Statisticians Can Easily Mislead Doctors About Statin (or any) Drug Safety

Doctors don’t go to medical school to become expert at interpreting statistics. Yet most of the articles that tell us how safe drugs might be rely on complex statistical analyses that go far beyond what I learned in my one credit course on Statistics for Medical Practitioners.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

What Every Doctor Should Know About Ancel Key’s Experiments

If you’ve been reading the news, you probably know that eating delicious foods like butter and eggs is no longer thought to increase risk of heart attack or stroke. This post discusses new information has come to light suggesting Ancel Keys suppressed evidence that polyunsaturated fats are more harmful than trans fat!

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

High Cholesterol and Breast Cancer: Is there a connection?

Cholesterol is now blamed for breast cancer. Learn what the science quoted in the media actually says.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Statin side effects: Almost universal and often missed.

One of the most distressing things about practicing medicine these days is the blind faith that most people, doctors and patients, have in cholesterol pills like Lipitor, Crestor, Vytorin, and Zocor, just to name a few of the most popular. This faith comes not from gullibility, but from carefully crafted drug company misdirection. There’s no

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Statin Side Effects Slowing You Down? Why your doctor may not be able to help.

When insurance companies pay doctors based on their prescribing patterns, you may not be told about potential medication side effects. This is particularly true when it comes to side effects of cholesterol medications called statins.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Can Arterial Disease be Reversed?

The old model describes arteries as so many mechanical tubes that have no way to protect themselves from the inevitable clogging that comes from the consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat. The other, new model sees arteries as living dynamic tissue that, in the context of a healthy diet, is capable of growth, repair, and rising to the challenge of rigorous exercise.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

How starting a low-cholesterol diet leads to weight gain

The advice to cut cholesterol almost always leads to eating more carbs, which increases triglyceride and often LDL levels, which leads to being placed on cholesterol pills, which can cause diabetes.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

FDA Officially Unconcerned that Crestor Causes Diabetes

Imagine a world where everyone is on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs. Not just sick people. Everyone. Astra Zeneca has imagined it, and now they’re going to see their dream come true. On December 16, the FDA announced their approval of Astra Zeneca’s cholesterol-lowering drug Crestor for use in people without high cholesterol despite the fact that

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Statins and Heart Failure: A Deadly Mix?

If you have been diagnosed with heart failure, statin drugs, which most cardiologists will prescribe to you if your cholesterol levels are not where they recommend, may need to be stopped.

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Pay for Performance

Penalties for Doctors who Refuse to Sell Cholesterol Drugs On Wednesday July 9,2008 the Garden Island Newspaper published my Letter To The Editor (Thank you Garden Isle) I feel my patients and the people of Hawai‘i have the right to know some of what goes on behind the scenes at HMSA, our island’s number one health

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Does Every Diabetic Really Need A Cholesterol Pill?

An important study was stopped early, for reasons they don’t explain. What has me worried is that the study appears to have stopped just as the death rates rose

Health & Nutrition · Dr. Cate

Cholesterol Pills For Kids – Stop The Madness!

I went for a job interview and was told that if I failed to get my patients LDL levels down to 100 (with drugs) “someone will sit down and talk with you.”