FEATURE

Statins and cholesterol- the fig leaf has come off.

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” 

Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

Statins are the most sold, most dangerous, most talked about reductionist chemicals used in the western medical therapeutics to get a “better report” of fat profile of the hapless unsuspecting humans whom we call as patients because they have lots of patience to bear with all the insults that we inflict on them. Teachers taught that statins are the best bet to get the patients fat profile back to “normal”! Some of those teachers at the Harvard University were later shown to be on the pay roll of the statin manufacturers! Students had to regurgitate that in the exams to get their coveted degrees. The drug barons took bets about their sales and spent a billion dollars in one year for advertisement and doctor hospitality to net just about $ 13 billion in one year!  

The CEO of a company was the happiest at his success. Almost every one that is on statins had to suffer not one but many side effects both, symptomatic like muscle pain and muscle loss or asymptomatic ones like liver damage, muscle damage, kidney damage, brain damage, and what have you. An Australian study had shown that every patient given statins shows microscopic muscle damage almost from the beginning! The scariest part of the whole saga is that these companies knew to start with that stains were dangerous drugs that destroy the human liver function. Liver produces cholesterol in our bodies to keep us alive and healthy as cholesterol forms the cell membrane of every human cell of which we have 120 trillion in all. Billions of them die a natural death (apoptosis) daily to be replaced by new cells. The raw material for the new cell membrane (wall) has to come from body’s chlolesterol manufacturing body, the liver.

The latest British Medical Journal (March 21, 2015) has a large invited article by Sidney Wolfe, an advisor to the Public Citizen group in New York. Rosuvastatin, the latest darling of the thought leaders among the medical profession who work for the industry, has been the leader in the market with annual profit of 13 $billion and the company had spent $ one billion a year for promotion which includes doctors’ hospitality as well. The JUPITOR study, one of the largest studies in the conventional sense, statins had not passed the litmus test. Although there are some pharmacokinetic differences between the various statins they all belong to the same family that work identically inside the human system to block the HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. One of the largest studies of statins in the world, a meta-analysis of one lakh thirteen thousand three hundred and ninety four patients, showed that between 7-27% of patients on statins will become diabetics in one year. The Rosuvastatin study, an RCT done long before the drug was certified for human use by the FDA, had shown rabdomyolysis, muscle degeneration. How could that drug be licensed? It got the green signal from the FDA and went on to become the most sold drug! That much for the honesty of our regulatory controls to safeguard patient safety.

Be that as it may, the very connection between fat profile and heart disease is so shaky that if we went into it from oneend to the other so many skeletons will stumble out of the regulatory body’s cupboards. The whole edifice of fat-diseases connection started with Ancel Key’s study. That study was so badly sexed up and doctored to get positive connection where none existed. Rest of the story was built on that dry sand foundation. Truth, unfortunately, is very lazy. By the time truth could pull up its pants to start, falsehood and mystery will have gone round the globe twice over! We might break our heads but the most powerful pharma lobby will prevail, truth notwithstanding. God save mankind from this unholy nexus between drug manufacturers, the medical profession and the regulatory agencies. Thank God, the industry has not succeeded in getting statins put into drinking water supplies! They have put it into the POLYPILL- a Rama Baana for all ills. Hope for that utopia where truth prevails.

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...” 

Leo Tolstoy