Did you know that the cut off for “high” cholesterol used to be nearly twice as high as it is today? The number considered low enough has had to shift downward multiple times. Cholesterol-lowering “targets” are lower today than ever before. And lately, heart attacks are increasing.
Dr. Cate gives you the peer-reviewed research revealing cholesterol pills are much more dangerous to your brain than doctors have been led to believe.
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.
Are you watching your cholesterol? Then you might be interested to read this story, describing the American Heart Association’s role in creating mass cholesterol-phobia, including evidence that they actively suppressed information that would have changed the course of medical history.
Cholesterol is now blamed for breast cancer. Learn what the science quoted in the media actually says.
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 statin drugs available today. This faith comes not from gullibility, but from carefully crafted drug company misdirection. Few realize that statins work differently than other drugs physicians prescribe for long-term use. Most drugs just block a receptor. Statins block a metabolic pathway, and this means they can alter every cell in your body in one way or another. What exactly…
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.
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.
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.
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 a new study showed conclusively that the drug causes diabetes. By a vote of 12 to 4, the panel judged that even people at very low risk of heart disease should take the cholesterol medication anyway. “I do think the diabetes problem is real, but…
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.
90 percent of insurance plans pay doctors to prescribe drugs to manage your health according to guidelines. Is that a good idea?
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
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.”
You know cholesterol pills will lower your cholesterol. But do you know cholesterol pills don’t prevent heart attacks by lowering cholesterol? They work by what the pharmaceutical companies call “a pleitropic effect” meaning they have so many effects we can’t understand or predict them all. Isoprene: A Building Block for Cellular Health Cholesterol pills called statins lower cholesterol by blocking the enzyme that forms a chemical required for the earliest steps of cholesterol manufacture, the making of isoprene units. If you can’t make isoprene units, you can’t make cholesterol. But your body uses isoprene units for a whole bunch of…
