This is exactly the point: When you ask someone to take a daily drug with systemic effects, you want a helluva lot more information about the long-term effects, and they just don’t have it. I’m sick of fighting with doctors over things like this, but I’m not going to stop anytime soon:
Medical guidelines issued late last year may double the number of Americans who are told to take these cholesterol-lowering drugs. But the recommendations don’t distinguish patients by gender, and a small, increasingly vocal group of cardiologists believe that’s a mistake.
Far too many healthy women are taking statins, they say, though some research indicates the drugs will do them little good and may be more likely to cause serious side effects in women.
“If you’re going to tell a healthy person to take a medicine every day for the rest of their life, you should have really good data that it’s going to make them better off,” said Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the editor of JAMA Internal Medicine. Lowering cholesterol should not be not an end in itself, she added, and cholesterol may not play the same role in heart disease in women as in men. “You can have high cholesterol and still be really healthy and have a low risk of heart disease,” she said.
Although women represent slightly more than half of the population, they have been vastly underrepresented in clinical trials of statins. As a result, evidence on the benefits and risks for women is limited.
How about we substitute this headline instead “No medication without good reason. Do your due diligence and don’t rely on any doctors recommendations.” When one realizes that most drugs prescribed today didn’t even exist 15 years ago how can you expect any historical data showing long-term effects? Doctors are “practicing” their craft and we are the guinea pigs.
As I heard it, cardiologists are actually somewhere near the front on pointing out how stupid it is to medicate everyone without obvious cause.
What happened was that the pharmaceutical industry redefined the cholesterol level at which statins should be taken. I’m not sure how many studies that was based on, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s one. Funded by them, probably.
That is literally all. It’s such a blatant grab for more money from the insured that even the doctors are exasperated.
The book that lays this out most authoritatively is Dr. David Perlmutter’s book “Grain Brain.”
He lays out the arguments for the deception associated with the statin drugs. His website is http://www.drperlmutter.com/