What You Don’t Know About Statins Can Hurt YouJulian Whitaker, MD When people arrive at the Whitaker Wellness Institute taking a statin cholesterol-lowering drug such as Lipitor, Zocor, Pravachol, Lescol, Mevacor, or Crestor, we stop it on sight. We don’t do this because of an irrational anti-drug bias. Some prescription medications are necessary. Statins, however, are terrible drugs. They’re dangerous, costly, and marginally effective. Even so, their manufacturers have successfully insinuated them into our culture. Lipitor, the flagship of the statins, is the best-selling drug in the world, generating more than $10 billion a year for Pfizer. Imagine, a single pill swallowed by enough people to rake in $10 billion! This is obscene. Even worse is the degree to which the public has been deluded about the benefits of these drugs and left in the dark regarding their complications. Overblown “Benefits” The statin drugs’ claim to fame is that they lower cholesterol. But what is the true risk of high cholesterol? The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT), one of the definitive studies on risk factors for heart disease, showed that elevated cholesterol (along with high blood pressure and smoking) increased risk of heart attack and death from cardiovascular disease. Individuals with cholesterol levels of 275 or higher had a greater risk of death (1.3 percent) than those with levels of 150 or less (0.3 percent). What this really means is that for every 100 people in each group, one more person in the high-cholesterol group would die from heart disease than in the low-cholesterol group. Yet expressed as percentages, 1.3 is more than 300 percent higher than 0.3. Folks, this is a prime example of using statistics to lie. To save ten people in the high-cholesterol group compared to the low cholesterol group, you would have to treat 1,000 people with drugs with known toxic side effects that increase death from other causes. Is this good medicine? No, it’s insanity. Statins Do Not Save Lives Just as these drugs’ benefits are overblown, their complications go, if not unnoticed, then certainly unreported. The most significant of them is increased risk of death. That’s right. These drugs may reduce numbers of deaths from heart attack and other cardiovascular events, but risk of death from other causes goes up, canceling out any survival benefit. A large, multi-center study published in the New England Journal of Medicine involved 10,000 patients with high cholesterol and heart disease. They were randomly assigned to take either 10 mg or 80 mg of Lipitor and were followed for an average of 4.9 years. Conventional physicians are doing back-flips over the results, which showed significant reductions in cardiovascular events and deaths in the high-dose Lipitor group. What you likely won’t hear is that although the number of deaths from cardiovascular disease decreased by 22 percent in those taking high doses of Lipitor, there was a commensurate increase in deaths from other causes. In other words, there was no significant effect on overall mortality at all! Underplayed Toxicity Another thing you rarely hear about is the liver and muscle toxicity of these drugs. In the Lipitor study, incidence of elevations in enzymes indicative of liver damage was six times higher in the high-dose group compared to the low-dose group, and there were more reports of muscle pain, myopathy, and rhabdomyolysis (complete muscle breakdown). The FDA has mandated that the warning label of Crestor be beefed up to “more strongly emphasize the risks of myopathy,” and Baycol, another statin, was taken off the market a few years ago because of its toxicity to muscle tissue. These drugs are just plain dangerous. Statins have also been linked to increased risk of kidney disease, immune system suppression, memory loss, and cancer. In the Pravachol study mentioned above, the incidence of breast cancer in women taking Pravachol was 12 times higher than in those taking the placebo. Yet this was dismissed because of the low numbers and the fact that it had “not been reported in previous or ongoing trials.” As you can see, the toxicity of these drugs is underplayed at every stage. And there’s more. A Friend’s Story I had dinner with a friend of mine I’ll call Sue, a 50-year-old woman with high cholesterol who was started on Lipitor. Shortly thereafter she became very seriously constipated. When it had lasted 10 or 12 days she went to the emergency room, where she was successfully treated. Sue had never had been constipated in her life and couldn’t understand it—until it dawned on her that this problem began immediately after she started to take Lipitor. She didn’t know Lipitor could cause constipation, and her doctor certainly never mentioned it to her. She simply put two and two together and asked her doctor about it. Sure enough, the Physicians’ Desk Reference (PDR) states, “The most frequent adverse events thought to be related to atorvastatin [Lipitor] are constipation, flatulence, dyspepsia, and abdominal pain.” Her doctor took her off Lipitor and put her on a different statin, Zocor. Within days she developed pustules, itching, and redness of her skin. Again, this was new to her, but this time, she realized there might be a connection to her drug. She went back to her doctor, who looked at the PDR, and guess what? It says right there in black and white that Zocor can cause eczema, itching, and rash. She stopped taking Zocor, and her skin problems went away. By then, Sue had had quite enough and rightly refused to take any cholesterol-lowering drug ever again. Recommendations
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Modified from Health & Healing with permission from Healthy Directions, LLC. Copyright 2005. Photocopying, reproduction, or quotation strictly prohibited without written permission from the publisher. To subscribe to Health & Healing, click here. |
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It is important that you do not reduce, change, or discontinue any medication or treatment without first consulting your physician. Dr. Whitaker offers his recommendations only as "generally informational" and not as specifically applicable to any individual's medical problem(s), concerns, and/or needs.