New study of statin data has all the earmarks of a Big Pharma whitewash
It looks like Halloween is coming early this year.
I’ve been warning you about cholesterol-lowering statins for years, and how they’ve been linked to everything from muscle damage to diabetes.
Now a new fright campaign with Big Pharma’s fingerprints all over it is trying to scare millions of people right back onto their statins.
But before you think it’s time to reconsider that Lipitor Rx you told your doctor you would never fill, you need to hear the real story.
“They do you more good than harm.”
That’s what the mainstream media lemmings are now dutifully reporting to us about statins.
But for a long time now I’ve been sounding the alarm about the bodily harm these meds can cause. At this point the research is clear as can be: statins have numerous, life-altering adverse side effects.
For (a small) example, these drugs have been proven to cause:
- Severe muscle pain or weakness.
- Liver damage — and death. An old Pfizer study (the maker of Lipitor) found that people taking 80 mg of its drug were more likely to turn up dead, and that it ups your chances of liver damage by a giant 500 percent.
- New-onset diabetes. In a study I told you about last year, researchers found that statins can turn perfectly healthy people diabetic. And that risk wasn’t a small one either, but an increase of a whopping 87 percent!
It looks, however, like Big Pharma and its minions will stop at nothing until every man, woman and even child in this country are popping statin drugs.
And to show you how that works, we don’t have to look any further than this current research and hot media story.
But if you’re wondering how the researchers explain away all those serious side effects, well, if you actually read the whole story, they really don’t.
At first they tell us about the “devastating consequences” of not taking statins, and that every year we keep popping those pills we’ll get healthier.
But then they go on to say “the only serious adverse events” (caused by long-term statin therapy, no less) are muscle pain and weakness, diabetes and “probably hemorrhagic stroke.”
Seriously? I think that’s about the top of the heap when it comes to side effects.
But not to worry, the researchers say, because the media exaggerates how many are affected. It’s really an unfortunate case of bad press.
And if you’re wondering about all those supposed benefits of statins, hear what a University of South Florida analysis found. Apparently all those statin advocates “used statistical deception to create the illusion that statins are ‘wonder drugs’.”
The data has been manipulated not only to inflate the benefits, but also to downplay the adverse effects.
But the people behind this latest so-called review are hoping they can sweep all those previous findings into a kind of data dust bin.
Originally authored by Professor Rory Collins from the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, the study is made to look like an objective new scientific examination.
But if you look a little deeper, it turns out that “substantial revisions were made in response to detailed comments from the other authors.”
And just who are those other authors?
Well, for starters, they’re a kind of Big Pharma directory, having consulted for Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and on and on. Plus that, two of them are behind the most ludicrous statin idea to date — something I warned you about seven years ago called the polypill.
Look, I think we’ve heard enough about statins to know by now that being sucker-punched into taking these drugs is something that far too many people have lived to regret.
Sources:
“Use statins? They do you more good than harm, says study” Holly Ellyatt, September 9, 2016, CNBC, cnbc.com
