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If half the time that people were diagnosed with measles they were found to have no evidence of the measles virus, and half the time they were swarming with an infection of measles virus yet never developed measles, would we still say that the measles virus caused measles? I don’t think so. Infectious disease specialists starting with Dr. Koch, the German physician who derived the eponymous postulates that define an infective disease back in the nineteenth century, have specific criteria to determine whether a specific bacteria or virus causes a specific disease.
Not so with those wedded to the lipid hypothesis as is apparent from an of last Tuesday’s New York Times.
The gist of the article is thus: a 51 year old male has had cholesterol levels that have hovered at around 300 mg/dl for the past couple of decades. A physician had persuaded this man to take Lipitor (a “statin”? drug) in the past, but he had experienced side effects and stopped it. Since that time all his physicians had been after him to go on some kind of “statin”? drug to get his cholesterol down. In his latest blood test, his cholesterol levels zoomed up to 380 mg/dl, so he finally agreed to go on a “statin”? if his doctor could give him some kind of objective evidence that his “arteries were actually clogging.”? His physician sent him for an Ultrafast CT scan of the heart, an X-ray type of test that can actually see the coronary arteries and determine the degree of calcification in those arteries. The more calcification, the worse the disease. After the radiologist examined the scan he declared the guy free of coronary arteries disease with his arteries clean as a whistle. (Youcan see pictures of his scan in the article along with pictures of diseases arteries.)
You would think that his clean arteries would have his physicians saying something along the lines of, “Well, you’re one of the lucky ones, so we’ll just watch and maybe re-evaluate a little later on.”?
Right?
Nope.
His doctor said:
“I still want you on a statin. And Burt [the radiologist] agrees. You got lucky. But you still shouldn’t walk around with those numbers.”
Remember, doctors are supposed to treat diseases not numbers. Pharmaceutical companies have succeeded in persuading most physicians that the lipid hypothesis is a fact, and that numbers should be treated. If Lipitor and other “statin”? drugs were innocuous, this zeal to treat numbers would just be an expensive chimera. But these drugs are far from innocuous. Take a look at the book by Duane Graveline, M.D.
Not only can Lipitor steal your memory, it can do in your liver and cause a lot of other problems as well. Side effects of drugs are tolerable when the drug in question treats a disease, but elevated numbers are not a disease. Beware.
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