Short answer: Apparently not.
As I’m scrolling through my news feed this morning as I normally do, I saw it: The inspiration I needed to write. I admit that I usually find it difficult to work up the motivation to write but some things hit me upside the head so forcefully that I almost find it hard to not write. This was certainly one of those instances.
“How Young Is Too Young For Statins? These Heart Doctors Have A Surprising Answer”
That was the headline that got my attention. To say the least.
At first I thought my eyes might be tricking me. Or perhaps it was some kind of parody. Nope. They’re actually serious.
This kind of thing is head-exploding material for me. After I thought about it for a minute, I wasn’t sure if I felt like laughing or crying. Laughing because the notion is so blatantly absurd or crying because the medical-industrial complex has apparently launched a new campaign that will likely ruin the health of the millions who are naive enough to actually take their advice.
And by the way, no, those heart doctors do not have a “surprising answer.” Their answer is exactly what I would expect from bought-and-paid-for shills in white coats that consider themselves qualified to dispense health advice. It’s too bad that so many physicians have lost the ability to think for themselves and simply parrot what their Big Pharma overloads tell them. It’s actually worse than too bad because millions of people are being misled by doctors who are little more than pill-pushers. There’s virtually no effort to find the root cause of anything these days by mainstream medicine. Just write another prescription for another potentially health-destroying pharmaceutical and everything is just dandy.
Believe me, I sympathize with the ignorant masses that are just doing what their doctor tells them. That was me as recently as 2016 when I agreed to a TDAP vaccine shot since I was “due.” It was still too early in my journey towards truth at that time and I still believed that it was something that might benefit me. Is it a coincidence that I developed intermittent tinnitus about seven months later that I never had in my life and is still with me? Perhaps.
I am hard-pressed to think of an industry that is more evil than the pharmaceutical industry. They have a rich history of causing suffering and death with products they claimed were “safe and effective.” How many babies were born with horrendous birth defects in the 1950s due to the morning sickness drug Thalidomide? It is estimated that as many as 10,000 to 12,000 were. More recently, how many people died after taking the pain killer Vioxx? That number is estimated to be between 26,000 and 55,000. Shall I go on? I surely could but I think you get the point.
You don’t think epic failures like that would dial back Big Pharma’s efforts to get the entire population of the planet taking their poison garbage, do you? Hardly! In fact, this latest nonsense about the alleged benefits of statins is the second profit-promoting scheme I have heard about very recently.
It’s one of their “go-to” schemes they resurrect periodically to scare more people into taking blood pressure medication. Something that far too many people are taking for a condition that likely does not need treatment at all. There are extreme cases that certainly benefit from treatment but I suspect that vast majority of people taking these drugs do not need them. But don’t just take my word for it. Take it from one of those rare physicians that actually “gets it.”
Perhaps they aren’t happy with the results of their effort to get more people on their blood pressure drugs and decided to ramp up the statin propaganda as a result. Whatever their reason, beyond the obvious profit potential, you can be sure the article pushing statins was not something conceived of by a benevolent group of well-meaning cardiologists who lobbied Women’s Health to print a beneficial, health-promoting article.
I’m not sure I have ever even seen a copy of that magazine but I am willing to wager that its pages are not lacking pharmaceutical advertisements. Like so much of the programming on television these days, it is likely to be very heavily supported by the pharmaceutical industry and would probably go under without the advertising dollars they provide.
So, what is the deal with statins anyway? Isn’t it a good thing to lower your cholesterol? Probably not. The old “cholesterol causes heart attacks” lie was uncovered quite a while ago but since selling drugs to lower cholesterol is so insanely profitable, the Medical-Industrial Complex carries on pretending it’s true.
Apparently, it’s not good enough that millions of older people are taking statins so now the evil medical cabal wants people in their 20s and 30s taking their noxious potions. Cholesterol does not cause heart attacks and is actually involved in the process that repairs damaged arteries. The real problem is the damaged arteries that require extensive repair and that can lead to artery-clogging clots that could cause a heart attack. The logical approach is to treat whatever problem it is that is damaging arteries.
Cholesterol is vital for various bodily functions and especially for the brain. That is why statin users often find themselves dealing with brain fog and even more serious problems that may lead them to suspect that they are developing dementia. Lowering cholesterol that the brain needs for normal function is not the answer to the cardiovascular disease problem.
It is far more likely you can drastically reduce your disease risk (of all types!) by adopting a truly healthy diet. If nothing else, eliminate health-destroying seed oils from your diet. You will also probably lose weight like the 25 pounds I lost. It’s not an overnight solution by any means and took about four years for it melt away after I cut seed oils from my diet. But I also was not trying to lose weight and was eating plenty of things with a high saturated fat (the healthy kind!) content. Eliminating seed oils combined with a sensible weight loss plan would probably yield faster results.
I think it is beyond irresponsible to be suggesting to anyone that they should be taking statins. Suggesting it to people in their 20s and 30s is beyond ludicrous. Whether or not the doctors quoted in the article know they are misinformed about the link between cholesterol and heart disease is something I cannot possibly know. But I do wonder if they might have some incentive to convince people that statins are what they need to be taking to prevent it.
So, let’s consider what kind of incentives these doctors might have for pushing statins. We’ll start with Dr. John A Elefteriades since he does not have any obvious incentive and may just be misinformed by the Medical-Industrial Complex that makes up the rules that all physicians are expected to follow.
According to Open Payments, a federal government database that tracks various payments that health professionals receive, between 2018 to 2024, Dr. Elefteriades received a total of $4,765.14 from businesses in the health care industry with the majority of it ($4,050.29) coming from Artivion, Inc., a company that manufactures medical devices and does not seem directly involved in pharmaceutical production.
Next on our list of statin-promoting physicians is Dr. Cathleen N Bairey-Merz who states, “We feel highly confident about efficacy and safety in both women and men. Statins work equally well in both sexes.” Well, thanks for that doctor, that clears things right up. Maybe not.
At any rate, Dr. Bairey-Merz is running a little ahead, or perhaps it would more appropriate to say a lot ahead of Dr. Elefteriades with the majority of her payments coming from a company called iRhythm Technologies, Inc., another medical device manufacturer. However, she has received a significant amount from Sanofi, a pharmaceutical company that does not offer a statin drug but does offer other cholesterol-lowering medication. The chart showing what Dr. Bairey-Merz received between 2018 and 2024 is below.
I must include a disclaimer before we talk about Dr. Christopher Kelly because I cannot be 100 percent certain I located his record in the Open Payments database. That’s because there were a number of doctors with that name in the database but the one I included here was the only one listed with a cardiovascular disease specialty.
Presuming I have selected the doctor quoted in the article as saying, “Statins can lower heart attack or stroke risk by 20 to 30 percent” (I have serious doubts about that), we can see that he has received some money from the pharmaceutical industry, namely Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, a maker of diabetes drugs, high blood pressure medications and others. More interestingly, Dr. Kelly received a substantial payment from Pfizer and a smaller payment from AstraZeneca. Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca manufacture statin medications. The chart showing payment to Dr. Kelly between 2018 and 2024 is below.
Finally, we have Statin cheerleader Dr. Adedapo Adeyinka Iluyomade, who is quoted in the article as saying he thinks of statins as “sheep in wolf’s clothing.” I think the good doctor has that backwards but I do have to wonder if he has some incentive to promote statins.
The data from Open Payments reveals that Dr. Iluyomade received payments from the pharmaceutical industry including payments from Novo Nordisk, the makers of the popular weight loss drug Wegovy and Lilly, a manufacturer of diabetes and weight loss drugs and a host of other pharmaceuticals. A much smaller amount was received from the wonderful folks at Pfizer. The chart showing the payments he received between 2018 and 2024 is below.
It seems like it is pretty common for physicians to receive payments from pharmaceutical companies and I am sure that there are many legitimate-sounding explanations for that. Some of us suspect that those payments could bias those doctors in favor of the company’s products or perhaps simply motivate them more to prescribe pharmaceuticals in general.
I’m still a bit flabbergasted to see that there are people out there with MD after their name promoting the idea that people in their 20s and 30s should be taking statins. I cannot recall the last time I heard advice that ridiculous coming from the medical establishment. That’s pretty impressive considering the crap they dispense these days that’s considered “medical advice.”
Don’t forget that the party line regarding the disastrous Covid-19 mRNA jabs remains the same: “Safe and effective.” That may be the most egregious lie of all time and I believe that will become obvious to everyone in the not-too-distant future.
It’s abundantly clear that this effort to push statins on younger people is the same scam they are using to get more people on blood pressure medication by moving the goalposts every few years and changing what constitutes “high blood pressure.” I expect they will do the same thing with cholesterol and will lower the number that is considered “high” before long. I do not think that the pharmaceutical industry will be satisfied until every human being on the planet is regularly ingesting the crap they are selling.
If you want the real story on statins and how incredibly harmful they can be, see this article by “A Midwestern Doctor,” another physician who “gets it” and is willing to speak the truth about the abysmal state of health care in our country today.
I just wish more people were skeptical about the advice coming from most doctors today. You would think it would be obvious that something is very wrong with a nation that spends more than any other on health care and is still riddled with a wide array of disease and generally poor health.
Instead of providing their patients with advice that would actually lead to better outcomes, most doctors will just write a prescription intended to treat the symptoms instead of the underlying disease. That’s a much more profitable approach for Big Pharma and their greed, which really doesn’t seem to have a limit.