The “goods” with statin treatment

September 2009

The statins are better than snake oil

It is often said that statins are good for almost any human disease. The method used to ‘prove’ that is to compare people on statin treatment with untreated people. Most people in the latter group have of course low cholesterol, and not only low, but very low cholesterol, because as you know the upper limit for normal has been lowered again and again through the years. It is well-known that low cholesterol is a risk factor for many diseases; to mention only infectious ones and cancer. What these researchers have shown is therefore that high cholesterol is beneficial because people in the statin group have had high cholesterol most of their life.

One of the allegations is that statin treatment protect against pneumonia. Recently researchers compared 1125 patients with pneumonia with 2235 healthy people of the same age and sex. What they found was that more of the pneumonia patients were on statin treatment, not less. Their result was recently published in British Medical Journal

Recomended reading

If you think that the statin trials have proved that cholesterol lowering is beneficial I recommend you to read two important books written by people with inside information about how we are conned by the drug industry. The first one is “The Truth About the Drug Companies” by Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s most respected medical journals. The other one is “The Trouble With Medical Journals” by Richard Smith, former editor-in chief of British Medical Journal, another great and respectable publication.