Thanks for a solid article with good references. I am lucky: have never been on subscription medication for anything and only had antibiotics a few times (mid-50's age group). But it's not just luck; even as a young man with no background to speak of in either science or medicine I intuited that far too much of it was based on making money. Well, it doesn't even take intuition, you can see it everywhere. But intuitively, also, any time I did go to a doctor's office or hospital, in both former and especially latter clearly the atmosphere was non-natural (aka 'sterile') with a disconnection from body and an overly cerebral relationship to the physical and an overly conceptual/materialistic relationship to mind. So I never bought into modern western materialist science and general philosophical outlook.

As a native skeptic, so to speak, I am never surprised to learn how much of the science supposedly underlying fancy, expensive, technology-based medical procedures is largely bogus, and like so much else in society today, dollar-driven.

You find the exact same sort of flaws in so many areas today, such as evolution and global warming controversies and many more. When you peak under the skirts of these harlots of science, you find not fact but belief, or if you prefer the fancier scientific term: 'a priori assumptions'. 

Your subject and the above examples in a wider but related sphere reflect deep flaws in our collective view about life and society. And these things are rarely being addressed. Collectively we barely possess vocabulary for a discussion so much as modern materialism dominated the philosophical terrain to the point where nearly everyone, both atheist and deist, worship at it shrine.

Even though it is a very rudimentary outlook, one our ancestors discarded as overly simplistic several millenia ago. Yes, we have fancy new gadgets, but such tricks should never be confused with real wisdom, intelligence, art, advanced culture and so forth.

Anyway, thanks again.

by Ashley Howes (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 20 comments) on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008 at 4:37:01 PM

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Thank you so much for this incredible compilation of cholesterol studies. I had a friend who died from "side-effects" of statin drugs. I believe that as many as 50% of statin users suffer some kind of side-effect. That would be unacceptable even if the drug was doing any good.

I was diagosed with high cholesterol six or seven years ago. I trusted the diagnosis and believed in the dangers. But I didn't trust any drugs. I took statins for a short time and then decided to use exercise and diet to reduce my cholesterol level.

When I found out about what was happening to my friend, I vowed never to touch statins again. I was also diagosed with diabetes and began taking a drug for that. Again, I looked for an alternative. I found a vegetable that was recommended by a psychic, dead many years ago. The first time I ate the vegetable, I also took my diabetes drug. My reading after that was in the 70s. I dropped the drug and just ate the vegetable twice a day. I found that the vegetable lowered my blood sugar slightly more than the drug.

Of interest was the fact that when I told my primary care NP and my diabetes doctor, neither of them asked me what vegetable I was eating. I was stunned! I just told them that a simple vegetable reduced my blood sugar more than an expensive and toxic drug and they weren't the least bit curious about it. For your information, it was the Jerusalem artichoke or sun choke.

When I decided to go to a new primary care doc after we moved to another state. He was very concerned about my risk for heart problems because of my diabetes and high cholesterol. I had since read articles suggesting that cholesterol had no relationship to heart problems. This guy wanted me to take a cholesterol drug, a diabetic drug, a high blood pressure med (even though my blood pressure wasn't high), and aspirin. I told him I would take a baby aspirin and that was all.

His own tests showed that my blood sugar was well controlled.

I think that this doctor is a good man and he really believes in what he is doing. I don't think the average doctor has time to research all of the drugs they prescribe and that they get most of their information from drug company propaganda. How do we educate the medical establishment? They are killing people.

I read that the third leading cause of death in the U.S. is prescription drugs, properly taken. If you add to that the number of deaths from iatrogenic causes, it can be said that the American health care system is the leading cause of death in America. That is frightening. Thanks again for this wonderful compilation. I feel incredibly relieved about my cholesterol level, which was never seriously high.

by Bob Trowbridge (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 70 comments [1 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008 at 7:04:51 PM

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Well this article kind of proves, you don't need STATINS!

Ten years ago my Doctors at the VA hospital in Seattle put me on Zokor and six mo later I had so much pain in my arm and hands. I found out it was side effects from Statins. I then quit all medications from the VA and went on alternative Natural supplements, ( Actually, they shouldn't be called Alternative, as they are the Natural way we should heal ourselves)

The Drugs from the Pharmaceutical industry are alternative and should never be used first.

My chlorestrol has always been around 350, and I knew my liver made it, and I figured, if my liver made it then it knew better then I did what my body needed.

I see lots of people that are on Statins and I try to tell them to stop taking it, and they tell me their Doctor knows more then I do, so they continue taking it.

I know our ancestors lived off what nature provided for centuries and they never had any chemicals added to their diet, and they did just fine. Look how many off springs have been produced from them.

The largest problem we have in our food supply now is, Corporations have gotten involved with producing our food and it is just plainly profit driven.

They have destroyed the soils and added so many chemical additives that it makes the food worthless, as far as nutrients and minerals our cellular system requires for great health. The Sea now has all the best nutrient and all the minerals we need and we will have to get our food source from the Sea if we want true health.

I take a great product with Marine phytoplankton in it with other land plant life. It is FrequenSea, and it has changed my health and life so much.

I decided I would tell the world about it and so that is my passon, to help everyone I can to get their health back.

http://www.my-healthy.info.4u

MY blog has much info in it for your reading enjoyment. So you can return your body to being healthy again.

by Mel Smith (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 60 comments [21 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008 at 7:50:59 PM

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Is the link still operational for others?

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 at 10:15:27 AM

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As some wise man once said, “No matter how much evidence there is to support it, it is almost impossible to convince a person that something is true if his fat income and financial security depend on not believing it.”  Or words to that effect.

Almost 20 years ago I was told that there was a small lump on my prostate gland that was very likely a tumor and quite possibly cancerous.  The doctor who informed me of this had an almost triumphant attitude as he told me this – as if it were some kind of victory to have discovered that I probably had prostate cancer and that I would soon be dependent on him and his very advanced (and very expensive) medicine and equipment to ‘get well.’   In very strong terms I was urged to get a biopsy, which as you may or may not know is a gruesome and very painful procedure, causing some amount of internal bleeding, which, if you do have cancer, spreads these cancer cells into your bloodstream and thereby throughout your body.   Years ago this procedure was thought my some doctors to actually increase the likelihood that the cancer (if you had it) would metastasize.  However, in recent years such a notion has been banished from the urological community.  Why?  Well, I can’t help but wonder if the billions of dollars made by urologists treating prostate cancer might be part of the reason.  One visit to my urologist’s clinic cost me nearly a thousand bucks, given all the tests they ushered me into.  My PSA score had risen from 12 to 20 in the previous few years and I admit I was worried.  They wanted to plant radioactive beads in my prostate to kill the cancer.  However, my subsequent reading and investigation led me to discover studies which showed that men who did nothing to treat their high PSA scores died no sooner, on average, than those who followed all the very expensive directions of their urologist. 

Almost 20 years have passed since my first ‘dangerously high’ PSA score and I still get up 3 times a night to pee, just as I did 20 years ago and I’m still ostensibly healthy and fit at age 70.  And my last PSA score was 80!  However, the significant thing is that a month prior to that last PSA test, my PSA was 90.  So I’ve dropped it ten points in one month.  And what might I thank for that?  I read the following report on the Internet, below, and then sent away for the medicine it describes, and took it regularly over the last month.  Whether taking more of this medicine will cause my PSA score to continue dropping, as it did for the patients in the clinical trial described below, remains to be seen.

Here’s the report:

“Men who are on active surveillance or a “watchful waiting” for prostate cancer may be eligible to enroll in a UC Davis Cancer Center clinical trial of genistein concentrated polysaccharide, or GCP, a food extract derived from soybeans and shiitake mushrooms. The new study builds on a preliminary trial, completed last year, that found GCP reduced levels of prostate-specific antigen in a small group of “watchful waiting” patients.

Dr. DeVere White conducted a preliminary clinical trial of GCP in men with prostate cancer last year. Published in the February issue of the Journal Urology, the study found that PSA levels stabilized or dropped in eight of 13 “watchful waiting” patients who took GCP.

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/6413

=======================

And here’s a report on some possibly very important research in Japan that might very well lead to discoveries that will make all of the billions of dollars worth of prostate surgery and radiation treatments obsolete.  And what a heartbreaker that will be for the medical-industrial complex – at least for the urologists who make very fat salaries within said multi-billion dollar complex.

Title:  Anti-Tumor Effects of the Combination of Genistein Concentrated Polysaccharide (GCP) and Active Hexose Correlated Compound (AHCC).

Authors:  SUN, B., MUKODA TOMOMI,  MIURA FUJII, YUAN, L.,  WHITE, R.V. (Univ. California, Davis)   

Journal Title:  Biotherapy (Tokyo)

ISSN:  0914-2223

VOL.15, NO.3, PAGE 379-382 (2001) 

Abstract:

We investigated the synergistic anti-tumor effects of AHCC and GCP.  MTT assay was used to measure the inhibitory effects on tumor cell growth. It was found that both GCP and GCP+AHCC could inhibit the growth of all 8 cell lines tested in dose-dependent manners.  Furthermore, GCP down-regulated VEGF expression in the cell lines, though GCP+AHCC induced more obvious apoptotic death and up-regulated p21 expression compared with either GCP or AHCC alone.  GCP+AHCC show a synergistic effect on inhibition of tumor growth in PC3-bearing nude mice. Although the inhibitory effects were observed in all three groups, the inhibition in the GCP+AHCC group was much more obvious than in the groups with GCP or AHCC alone. When the treatment was stopped, the tumors increased rapidly. After treatment was restarted, the tumor growth was inhibited again. It can be concluded that the anti-tumor effect was increased synergistically by a combined administration of GCP and AHCC. 

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200120/000020012001A0723909.php

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 at 10:48:37 AM

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I was a scientist in a past life and the marketing of Statins by Big Pharma is almost criminal in my opinion. Cholesterol is ESSENTIAL for all cells to survive and there are numerous studies that shown neurons grown in cell culture die very quickly when you do anything to lower cholesterol in their surrounding media.

The implications between a long-term regime of statins and neurodegenerative disease are staggering and now Pharma has recently recommended that children who are at risk to CHD should take statins. 

by E. Nelson (40 articles, 8 quicklinks, 26 diaries, 511 comments [57 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 at 1:51:32 PM

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Thank you very much for adding that information to this discussion.

I've recently been informed that I have an opportunity to get this article printed in a hardcopy publication and I will certainly add this info to it.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 at 8:47:56 PM

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Here is the link to my OpEd piece on Flax seed as a natural alternative to statins under certain circumstances.

by E. Nelson (40 articles, 8 quicklinks, 26 diaries, 511 comments [57 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Wednesday, Nov 26, 2008 at 4:18:40 PM

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Okay, let's have a little perspective.  Very high cholesterol (hypercholesterolemia) is a genetic disorder that IS responsible for heart disease.  The problem is defining the relative risk in people as cholesterol levels drop from the extremely high range into the normal range.  Some people clearly benefit more than others by lower cholesterol levels.  Unfortunately, we fail to define who benefits the most, so the medical profession embraces the concept of "give it to everyone so long as any benefit is identified".  It is not just the statins where this is practiced, one finds the same approach used in antihypertensive therapy and antidiabetic (Type II) therapy as well.

The Crestor study that reported serious adverse outcomes were cut in half by giving people Crestor with normal cholesterol is a good example.  If you read the article, Crestor cut the adverse outcomes from 1.8% to 0.9% after nearly 2 years on the drug.  In other words, 98.2% of the people had no hope of receiving any benefit from the drug after 2 years of taking it.  The cost of treating everyone to cut the adverse outcomes from 1.8% to 0.9% works out to about $325,000/incident.  That is NOT $325,000 per life saved, but $325,000 to prevent a single heart attack, stroke OR death.  I can understand why big Pharma wants people to pay out that kind of money to prevent a single problem.  I can't understand why people think this is a cost effective use of their medical care dollars or why the press does not discuss the cost of this as a relevant factor. 

We spend way too much money to try and prevent a problem.  We don't pay nearly enough attention to the relative benefit versus the cost, and we ignore the additional problems created by our solutions.  Muscle aches and weaknesses are typical side effects of statin therapy and statins can also interact with other drugs given concurrently.  There are individual differences in the benefits and risks from drugs and we know too little about these.  Until we know more, people should seek non-drug solutions to their medical problems if at all possible. 

People forget most drugs do not treat the underlying health problem.  They treat the disease symptom.  The assumption is the clinical symptom we treat (high cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood glucose) causes the clinical disease.  That is not always true and if applied uniformly when the symptom reflects a different biological process might do more harm than good. We assume the symptom treated is the only factor that is relevant to the disease process and that its presence is equivalent to the disease.  But what if elevated cholesterol, blood pressure and blood glucose are also affected by factors like age, race, sex, diet, stress, infections, weight or other factors unrelated to the disease process?  Blindly altering them without regard to the reason for their elevation could be detrimental if these symptoms have a protective role and do not produce a disease outcome under different set of circumstances.  That is the problem, blindly changing clinical parameters because they are associated with ONE disease, without understanding their physiological relevance or importance in OTHER biological processes.

by Peter Wedlund (3 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 211 comments [7 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:27:00 PM

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My understanding is that even with high levels of  blood cholesterol, the cholesterol passes right through any artery, without sticking to any part of any inner arterial wall -- _unless_ homocysteine levels are high and have had their bad effect on those walls, in which case deposits of cholesterol, fat, and calcium can then build up in one place or another.

 Here is an excerpt from an interview with a major medical researcher who knows a lot about the effects of homocysteine and has written a couple of books about it that are available through Amazon.

In a book called The Homocysteine Revolution, which was published about ten years ago, research scientist and author Kilmer McCully presents overwhelming medical evidence that homocysteine, and not cholesterol, is the main culprit in cardiovascular disease.  Here's the excerpt that appeared in a Life Extension Magazine shortly after one of his books was published:

LEM: You published your first animal studies on homocysteine and heart disease in 1970, yet the medical establishment is just now beginning to accept this evidence. Why is that?

McCully: One of the things that happened is that when I first presented this work at a national meeting, some of the cholesterol people were listening. And after my talk I was met by stony silence.

LEM: Why?

McCully: There was a refusal to acknowledge the significance of this work. I think part of it is misinterpretation, tradition -- professional preferences -- let's put it that way. And another curious thing happened which didn't help matters. A group contacted me about repeating some of my experiments, and I agreed. After they did this, they sent me slides, and I clearly identified lesions in the arteries (that had been exposed to high levels of homocysteine). Yet (in their research presentation) they published a photograph of a _normal_ artery, and claimed that _no_ lesions were observed that could be attributed to homocysteine! In a footnote they said that the few lesions that were found were attributed to "spontaneous origin." I felt -- as I say in the book -- totally betrayed by this. Because of what they did, the whole idea of homocysteine causing vascular disease was called into question -- by this one paper. In retrospect, I realize what I should have done was to photograph the lesions and publish an illustrated rebuttal. But I was too busy doing other things, and I was too naive to think they would pull a trick like that.

LEM: But weren't your studies confirmed?

McCully: Absolutely. Absolutely they had been confirmed. I still remember the day when I was called from the hospital saying that some of my rabbits had died. I remember examining the rabbits and finding that they had died of pulmonary embolism -- which is what some of the children with homocystinuria (abnormal excess of homocysteine) died of. These effects were duplicated by Kuzuya of Japan. Unfortunately, he published all his findings in Japanese, and I only found out about it relatively recently. About five or six years ago, he sent me a review in English, saying he had repeated all my experiments from 1974 and got the same results. It was one of those unfortunate circumstances where important data was not available to the English-speaking scientific world.

I think the central role of homocysteine in cardiovascular illness has been kept a secret from the public because Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex are making hundreds of billions of dollars every year out of the myth that cholesterol and fat cause heart disease and stroke. Here's another revealing excerpt from the interview Calli provided:

LEM: To what extent do drug companies drive scientific research?

McCully: The drug companies are highly oriented to the evaluation and promotion of their own products.

They don't contribute to a basic knowledge of disease processes in most cases. So, new ideas that involve unpatentable vitamin preparations or basic disease processes are not really supported by the drug industry because they have no commercial reason to do so. Quite the contrary. The drug companies are very busy making a tremendous fortune out of cholesterol-lowering drugs with limited demonstrable benefit -- only questionable benefit in highly selected populations -- with the unspoken knowledge that these drugs are carcinogenic in animals and highly toxic in certain individuals, causing liver damage and muscle damage, and other questionable effects. I'm talking about the statin drugs."

http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag97/nov-cover97.html

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:17:59 PM

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You said that some people clearly benefit more than others by lower cholesterol levels. 

 My question: 

 Assuming that the person does not have abnormally high levels of homocysteine in his blood, and is absorbing adequate amounts of folic acid and the B vitamins 6 and 12, then at what cholesterol level do you think cholesterol becomes dangerous in terms of causing cardiovascular disease?

 And what evidence can you cite to support your belief?

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:45:50 PM

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Billions can be made by Big Pharma from the sale of statins, but how much could they make from the sale of flax seed oil and vitamin C? Answer: not very damned much.  Hence the cholesterol hype. 

In one of the largest reviews to date, researchers at North Dakota State University published a 97-page review of flax seed's properties in the journal Advances in Food and Nutrition Research.  Among the multiple studies they cited that suggested a significant benefit for cardiovascular disease prevention, a 16-year study of 76,000 women published in 2004 and a separate 14-year study of nearly 46,000 men published in 2005 found that diets rich in ALA (flax seed's main fatty acid) significantly reduced the risk of coronary heart disease.  The higher the dose of ALA, the stronger the benefit, according to the 76,000-participant Nurse's Health Study.  The 16-year follow-up found that women on a diet of 1.5 grams per day of ALA had a 21 percent reduced risk of dying from coronary heart disease and 46 percent reduced risk for dying from sudden cardiac death than women on a diet of 0.7 grams of ALA per day. 

Other studies concluded that diets similarly high in ALA lowered the prevalence of plaques in the carotid artery, decreased the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, and lowered the risk of death due to stroke. 

And the cost for this prevention? Based on current prices, a one-year supply of flax seed from GreatPlainsFlax.com runs about $90.  In December 2006, one year's worth of the cheapest generic statin drug cost about $600, according to Consumers Union, while the most expensive ran to more than $1,700. 

Scientists strongly believe that inflammation is a key factor in the development of coronary heart disease, as well as diabetes and other diseases. 

Earlier this year, a small study by U.S.  and Chinese researchers in the British Journal of Nutrition suggested that flax seed-derived lignan (a natural plant- based compound) might modulate C-reactive protein levels in type 2 diabetics, especially among women. 

In a separate study, 22 post-menopausal Danish women ate a low-fat muffin, either with or without flax seed-derived lignan, every day for six weeks.  At the trial's conclusion, women who had eaten the lignan-containing muffins showed an average decline of 15 percent in their C-reactive protein levels."

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Flax-Seed-A-Natural-Alter-by-E- Nelson-081126-423.html

I've started to add a spoonful of flax oil to much of what I eat.  It's good on speghetti&tomato sauce, in soups, and also on vegies of any kind.  I also add it to whip-cream substitute that I make out of low-fat or no-fat cottage cheese, vanilla soy milk and crushed pineapple.  If you start using flax oil, make sure it has been refrigerated and is not more than two months old, and be sure and get the high lignan variety.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Wednesday, Nov 26, 2008 at 4:25:01 PM

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. . I need to tell any readers to reconsider all that I've reported in my opening remarks and throughout this discussion. Why? Because 3 months ago I had chest pains (angina) that were significantly more serious than the rather mild ones that I had previously experienced, and even those had been coming on with ever greater frequency. This ended up with me calling 911 and being taken to the hospital where I finally consented to have my first angiogram. Bad news: 98% blockage in one artery and 95 in two others. I had been following a strictly vegetarian diet for a month or more, and I have always eaten conservatively and from a health perspective. However, I had triple bypass surgery the next morning.

by Richard Clark (30 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 101 comments [2 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 8:12:06 PM

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