The big fat hoax known as the heart-risk calculator

News flash! Big Pharma’s pride and joy, what’s known as the heart-risk calculator, is broken!

Researchers from Stanford University are sounding the alarm about a tool used by doctors everywhere to determine your risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke.

But actually, this so-called calculator is doing the exact job it was designed for – scaring patients silly into starting up on statins, such as Lipitor or Crestor.

Seriously, saying it’s dishing out bad advice is as ridiculous as complaining that the fortune cookie you got was wrong!

And if your doctor gave you an Rx for a statin based on this gadget, you may very well be taking an extremely risky med for one reason only – to pad Big Pharma’s bottom line.

The statin scam

As we’ve told you here in the eAlert, using the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology heart-risk calculator is akin to saying, “Heads I win, tails you lose!”

The “calculator” is really nothing more than a computerized form filled out by you or your doctor, and you can find it online through several websites (including the ACC’s). It will ask about your cholesterol numbers, blood pressure, race, and a handful of other factors.

And when those two groups unveiled new statin guidelines for doctors to follow five years ago, that calculator played a pivotal role. After all, it’s fast, easy, and basically comes to one conclusion: start taking a stain, or else!

Now, Stanford researchers are saying the numbers it relies on are old, flawed, and have resulted in “many Americans” receiving “aggressive treatments they may not have needed.”

No kidding!

Mumbo jumbo about data and statistics aside (and my favorite nonsense of all, the very use of the word “calculator”), just glancing at this gizmo is enough to make you wonder how the mainstream thought anyone – let alone doctors – would fall for it.

It’s about as high-tech as a rain barrel! Why, you could be fit as a fiddle and still fail this test.

Simply answer 10 easy questions, starting with the real clincher: your age. We already know that the AHA and ACC have laid the groundwork for practically everyone over 40 – around 26 million Americans — to start popping statin drugs.

So, now that a big university study has called this cherished contraption into question, what happens next? Will docs start recalling all of those statin prescriptions and will the AHA say, “Whoops, our bad”?

I seriously doubt it.

At this point, we’ve living in the Land of Lipitor. That drug alone, one of eight statins on the market, sells to the tune of $7 billion… in a single year!

And the “fix” was in way back in the ’70s, when the FDA approved the second statin drug, Merck’s lovastatin, in a zippy nine months, the fastest it had ever OK’d a med in its history – up to that point, anyway!

The first statin hit the shelves in 1959 but was withdrawn when it was found to cause cataracts in patients. But guess what? That’s still a risk you take by popping any of the statins that are still out there!

And it’s not the only one — not by a long shot.

For example, statins are also known to cause:

• fatigue, along with debilitating muscle pain and weakness,
• new-onset diabetes,
• brain fog, and
• hardening of the arteries.

That last one should have been the final straw for these drugs. After all, you think that you’re risking all of these other known side effects to help your heart, but instead, you’re actually upping the risk of heart failure and atherosclerosis! It’s simply unbelievable that statins are still prescribed with such enthusiasm.

And for the icing on the cholesterol-free cake, a complete analysis of studies done last year failed to find any evidence that statins are saving anyone (regardless of their risk category) from heart disease.

So, if you’re currently taking a statin, it’s time to pull out your own calculator, one that measures the pain against any alleged gain that these drugs will be giving you, and then make an appointment to see your doctor ASAP.

It’s a calculation that will change your life for the better – and perhaps even save it.

“Heart meds may be wrong for millions of Americans” Serena Gordon, June 4, 2018, HealthDay, consumer.healthday.com