Why Statins May Not Be The Answer To Lowering Your Cholesterol

How Drug Companies Manipulated Me

I used to believe statins were safe and effective drugs.

Fresh out of training, I attended a pharma-sponsored educational dinner about a statin called Zocor that got me excited about writing prescriptions. The doctor presenting the slides made it seem like a no-brainer to use these amazing medications. I distinctly remember feeling empowered and slightly self-righteous when he said, “Those older studies that showed statins increased mortality (meaning they killed more people than they saved) were not designed well. This is the first study that shows Zocor saves lives.” It was literally the first time I’d heard of the drug, and the presenter already recruited me to side with the drug company against “the naysayers.” Those luddites! How could they not understand the value of this drug? 

That’s how easy it is to spin our heads in a given direction.

To keep us properly oriented, we’re told how minor side effects are exaggerated by “statin deniers” who represent the out-group. If we want to stay in the in-group, we simply follow a set of guidelines. We’re frequently reminded how statin drugs are safe and how much evidence supports the current guidelines. We’re prodded to do a better job of following our guidelines; I’ll get emails summarizing the latest medical news telling me, for example, that only “54% of adults with hypercholesterolemia take a cholesterol lowering medication” and that primary care doctors have “room for improvement.”

Doctors serving as paid consultants for the drug industry dominate required continuing medical education meetings. Pharma-conflicted physicians also populate committees that define “standard of care.” Drug companies fund the majority of studies that investigate the potential for statins to help or harm. Many of these studies do not present raw data and only show highly manipulated statistics, so we’re pretty much forced to take their word about the results.

In the past decade as medical education has migrated online, most of the websites are drug-company supported and the proportion of lecturing MDs serving as paid consultants for the drug industry is larger. The information provided by someone who is bullish on drugs will be different than someone who is neutral or concerned about side effects, but these less-enthusiastic doctors do not get paid to travel the country doing dinner presentations, so doctors rarely hear from them. 

Thanks to our lopsided education, few doctors know that statins are linked to profound psychiatric disturbances, or that neurologists warn caution when prescribing statins to people over age 65, and that cardiologists warn they can cause a form of heart failure. When statin enthusiasts provide us with our knowledge about statins, we won’t be told about the significance of something called a run in period. Most drug-company funded statin studies use this to actually identify patients who develop early side effects before starting the study – and then kick them out. They are not required to report how many people they kicked out or what side effects they suffered. 

Without a balanced education, if you, or someone you care about, were to mention problems with fatigue, memory problems, headaches, mood changes, heart palpitations, shortness of breath or other problems, any normal doctor is unlikely to stop and consider that statin drugs might be the cause. Symptoms rarely develop the day you start the pill and they usually come on slowly, waxing and waning, making it easy to overlook the drug as a possible cause. This is why you’ll find stories of people whose complaints to their personal physician were misinterpreted for years, and only after their symptoms became outright disabling did they muster up the courage to stop the medication — against medical advice. Then, their symptoms improved. 

Statins Suppress The Immune System, So We’re Told They’re Anti-Inflammatory

I want to show you an example of a potential negative effect of statins that has been transformed into a supposed positive. There are many possible examples of this I could offer, but since we’re living in an era of treatment-resistant infections, I’ll talk about how statins can suppress your immune system and why doctors don’t get the message. 

Think of your immune system as an army of soldiers charged with patrolling your body, sniffing out early cancers, and invading organisms. These soldiers live just a few days, and your bone marrow needs a steady supply of cholesterol to keep churning out new fighters, and keep your tissues properly protected. LDL cholesterol in particular is key to fighting infections. Statins cut off your bone marrow’s cholesterol supply lines, thus impairing your body’s ability to keep its army weaponized. 

Based on that information, it seems obvious that statins could potentially be really bad for your immune system, right? Now let me show you how easily the drug companies spin a negative side effect into evidence that statins are wonder drugs. All it takes is a half-truth, a little