I once asked a cardiologist friend what effect a statin had on athletes. His response captures it perfectly:
Hope that your competitors are taking them.
And that’s ignoring brain fog and diabetes and a host of other issues, all minimized and rationalized-away by mainstream medicine. If even WebMD (a mainstream sell-out) calls it out, you had better worry about it. Nasty side effects, some clinical and some subclinical with subtle and not so subtle loss of function*, all helpfully ignored by overworked practicing physicians, who must follow SOC or be fired/disciplined.
Cholesterol and statin half-truths, lies, propaganda.
I cannot possibly call out all the misleading claims and outright lies about statins and cholesterol but here are some basics:
- Cholesterol is one of the most critical substances in the body necessary for everything from cell structure/repair to sex hormones. Your body is not stupid; it regulates it according to its needs. Which includes more when under duress, adjusting for dietary intake, etc.
- The cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease has no objective basis in scientific reality, being laughably wrong now for 80 years or so. No causal evidence has ever been shown. The hypothesis has been overhauled and changed so many times with so many ridiculous variations and diversification that no objective thinker could possibly buy into the shoddy premises behind it.
- Just as many people with low cholesterol have heart attacks as those with high cholesterol!
- No study has EVER shown that women benefit from statins.
- No study has EVER shown that men benefit from statins, excepting the next point, which is exceptionally weak.
- The ONLY group that ever has shown a (tiny) benefit from statins is men under 65 who have already head a heart attack. This “benefit” probably stems from a mild anti-inflammatory effect and has nothing to do with cholesterol.
- Statins double and might triple the risk of diabetes, a far more serious issue than some non-existent theoretical “benefit”.
- The NTT (number to treat) is obscenely high, with no credible evidence of real benefit, and certainly not weight against the numerous harms.
- Higher cholesterol correlates increasingly strongly with increased longevity the older you get.
- Studies on statins are invariably weak, cut short to hide issues, ignore and minimize serious side effects, do not study many groups they are used, etc. Studies that show issues or lack of efficacy are never published. Side effects are ignored or minimized by doctors.
- Low cholesterol might be associated with violent crime.
In that context, let’s take a look at how the statin propaganda has so thoroughly ingrained itself that non-facts and outright lies are taken implicitly as the basis for further discussion.
Medical persuasion in the media, example.
This example article is one of the more balanced ones!
The title uses the persuasion technique of “thinking past the sale”. That is, a statement is made that the reader is expected to accept without question as part of a following claim. It’s a trick that a debater/persuader might use, but it has no place in science.
The article title below is itself propaganda. That is, virtually no one can benefit from a statin, see above; it’s all downside for 99% of the people taking them. The “you may not need part” is a persuasion trick to get you to accept as a fact that many people *do* need statins. Once accepted, your mind can be molded to what follows, never questioning that claim.
Oddly, this article quickly proceeds to contradict its own title. A better title might have been “Benefits of Statins Unproven, especially for some”.
For decades, the answer to lowering cholesterol to prevent heart attack or stroke was a statin prescription. Unfortunately, many people prescribed statins stop taking them due to side effects, while others question their efficacy. One study even found that doctors have overprescribed statins worldwide, which can potentially be harmful.
Is statin therapy suitable for you? A simple test could give you a better idea of your risk for a heart attack or stroke by evaluating your coronary artery calcium (CAC) score.
...
The “bad” cholesterol is not necessarily bad. It is theorized that one of LDL-C’s primary jobs in the bloodstream is to help repair artery walls from the damage caused by inflammation and bacteria. But once the LDL-C builds up along artery walls over time, it can form hard calcium plaques that block blood flow to the heart, ultimately causing a heart attack.
...
Agatston believes up to 50 percent of people who took a statin because of their high cholesterol level didn’t need them after finding their CAC score was zero.
...
WIND: medical insights have gone downhill at The Epoch Times. I’ve observed a steady shift into mainstream medical misinformation, by which I mean the unproven false premises in areas like cholesterol and statins.
To be fair to this article, it does mention the side effects and disputes in solid detail. But by implicitly accepting the premise that statins have a role to play for most of us, it undermines its own credibility.
As for CAC, mine is high, which is very common among ultra endurance athletes. But it’s also true that mortality is unchanged by that high CAC score. My cholesterol is high too, but it’s plain as day that the post-COVID EBV and thyroid disease are responsible—my body is doing what it needs to do to cope.
My doctors all of course tell me I should take a statin (they are required to by SOC guidelines), which I have refused—crackpot medicine. My internist finally acknowledged that my spike in high cholesterol last year was almost certainly due to an active EBV infection—the body increases cholesterol under infective duress. And of course my HDL (the “good” kind though that is now disputed) has been extremely high all through this, which most doctors just ignore.
My wife’s doctor prescribed her a statin, but she has a CAC score of zero (no calcium at all!). I consider that statin recommendation medical malpractice (literally), since no benefit has ever been shown for women. But it is Standard of Care (meaning legalized harm/damage). I wish such doctors could be hounded out of practice.
My mother has had high cholesterol most of her life, and she is 81 and has never had a heart attack or stroke, and her CAC is near-zero. Similarly, my father is 83 and no heart attack or stroke, with low cholesterol.
The cholesterol and statin meme has run its course.
This is an opinion piece*, based on years of study and personal experience. I’m not going to offer proof; that would require an entire book and others have done that work very well already. Besides, read that first sentence.
It is more comfortable and reassuring to maintain beliefs than to challenge them.
You the reader probably will not like this essay, so stop reading here*.
The ugly reality of today’s health “care” and ”science”*
Most scientific studies are false. Whether it’s medicine or climate “science”. Follow the money and it will rarely if ever let you down.
Public-facing experts not only are incorrigible liars and manipulators, but that they got everything wrong on COVID is now in evidence. In fact, if you reverse their edicts, they would have gotten most everything right. Prima facie evidence that something wicked happened. The idea that these sociopaths can be trusted in other areas is ludicrous. Follow the money.
Destruction of a noble profession’s intellect
Doctors (and I feel for them) are no longer allowed to think for themselves. Worse, too many go along with this—they are memorizers lacking critical thinking skills, and spineless supplicants to false premises rigidly embedded as cognitive commitments, which is painfully obvious in interactions. That’s on them (that class of doctors).
Of the remainder, being employees (thanks Obamacare!), they now do what they’re told to do by their employers according to the SOC (standard of care). I can only imagine how incredibly stressful and demoralizing that is for a thinking doctor—years of life spent at entering the field but now you have to turn off your most critical skill—independent thought. Assembly line medicine.
And now just to become a doctor, the grotesque destructive powers of CRT, ESG, woke everything is an inescapable requirement of training. Training indeed. Leading to intellectual collapse—a brain cannot be patterned to be both rigorous/scientific while simultaneously holding such “theories” as true. Not without severe side effects.
Today’s doctors must** follow the guidelines written by highly compensated physicians paid off one way or another by Big Pharma and/or Big Food — or else. Your treatment today for almost everything rests on corrupt/unethical “science” and financially and ethically corrupt “experts” that sit on high-profile advisory organizations, themselves funded by Big Pharma, Big Food, etc. A zero integrity process stemming from financial enrichment. Follow the money.
Is it any wonder that America (USA) keeps getting sicker and sicker, that this superating anti-health system is now infecting early childhood, and that hardly anyone is ever cured of a totally curable disease (eg Type II diabetes)? Is it any wonder that the great killing diseases are more widespread than ever before? At the least, we can say that the medical profession has failed utterly to improve public health on such fronts. Yes, these problems are more “treatable” with hundreds of expensive drugs that do nothing to cure, and come with side effects (more drugs to combat those!) and what drive’s it all: profits. That’s the idea. Follow the money.
Parasitical symbiosis of Big Food and Big Medicine
You are the host.
The Feedlot — Big Food — you are the milche cow
The feedlot (Big Food) makes most of us extremely unhealthy, creating disease, suffering and misery, if not outright criminal behavior. Poor nutrition leads to population-scale subclinical (and clinical) disease states that were surely a major factor in COVID deaths, including magnesium deficiency, massive seed oil consumption, etc. Epidemic rates of obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, etc all stem in large part from such factors. A nutritionally-undermined body cannot fight off any disease well—infectious or idiopathic.
Big Medicine has supported Big Food for 80 years or so now, delivering reams of harmful nutritional advice (very profitable for Big Food), starting many decades ago with the advice to replace butter with trans fats, And altering that recklessly damaging message minimally to this day (eg consume seed oils instead of trans fats (oops!) and/or cut fat way down).
Incredibly bad nutritional advice has been given by Big Medicine for 70 years, and still is. That’s not an honest mistake. It is unavoidable from follow the money. What we have is a vicious and heartless de facto mass abuse damage-and-degrade => assembly line medicine system, with with its pill pushers and procedures. The medical system not only has nothing to offer for real health, but actively degrades health by evading and outright ignoring root causes and a system that could address them. Follow the money.
The Slaughterhouse — Big Medicine
The “slaughter” is mostly financial, with the world’s most expensive health “care” rarely addressing the underlying disease state, created as noted above.
Except that the slaughter is also real: disease, suffering and misery, and ultimately deaths, the end result of the Feedlot and the Treatment circular assembly line. The slow-acting Dr HODAD* system.
Good news on the way — woke doctors
Doctors today are being admitted/selected based on crude physical characteristics and behaviors (race, sexual preference, etc). This ensures a highly qualified pool of future doctors is in the pipeline.
Future doctors now cannot even be trained without indoctrination into ESG, CRT, etc. Future doctor-patient interactions will be so improved by getting all the details right on your pronouns and all that good stuff.
Worst of all: the selection and training process weeds out the critical thinkers, the independent mind, the outspoken voice. Only the most robust mind could possibly withstand the onslaught, and there are very few such minds anywhere in society.
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