If all doctors followed the latest cholesterol treatment guidelines and all their patients took their prescribed statin medication, there would be 3.5 million more diabetics in America. But wait! There is another pill (or injection, actually) that has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes. And it's only about $50,000 per year per patient. Let's see: 3.5 million, times $50,000. What does that bring us to?
Pharmageddon!
We are stuck in an absurd cultural habit of thinking that medication will save us from lifestyle and social diseases.

Two separate studies in today's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) underscore that we have come to the end of an era of being saved by medication. Antibiotics and vaccines were a huge advance in medicine in the 20th century. But the single pill for the single ill just doesn't work for 21st century chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes.

Statins cause diabetes
The latest cholesterol guidelines (ATP III) increased the number of Americans who should take statin therapy from 13 to 40 million. Those additional 27 million are ones without heart disease, but who have high cholesterol. This type of treatment is called primary prevention. I have extensively reviewed the research on using statins to prevent heart attacks in people who never had them. The data is weak and shows no benefit, except the Jupiter trial, which ONLY showed benefit if patients also had inflammation (high C-reactive protein), not just high cholesterol or LDL. If you just had an elevated cholesterol, statins didn't help.
I have previously written about research that showed that statins increase the risk of diabetes. This latest study examined five major clinical trials on statins that included 32,752 non-diabetics over 4.9 years. During the study period, 2,749 patients (or 8.4 percent) developed diabetes. Those on the highest doses of statins (which are increasingly prescribed by physicians) were at the highest risk of developing diabetes.
While there was a slight overall reduction in risk of heart attacks in the patients treated with statins, the authors found that you have to treat 155 people for one year to prevent just one heart attack or death. If a doctor had to prescribe antibiotics to 155 people to cure just one patient of pneumonia, we would think that antibiotics weren't very good medication. But that is exactly the "number needed to treat" to prevent just one cardiac event. On top of that, for every 498 people treated, one more person would become diabetic. If these drugs were not the top-selling drugs in history, we might accept a small risk, but if we treated everyone who "needed" them, we would have more than 3.5 million more diabetics in America.
Using statins may be an acceptable risk if there was no other treatment for heart disease. And we spend more than $100 billon a year on angioplasties (which don't benefit 95 percent of people receiving them), and cardiac bypasses (which reduce the risk of death in only 3 percent of people who receive them), while ignoring that heart disease is a lifestyle and social disease that requires lifestyle medicine and a social cure that would prevent more than 90 percent of all heart disease.
Immune-suppressing medication prevents diabetes
In another study of nearly 14,000 patients, published in today's issue of JAMA, researchers from Harvard found that those treated with powerful immune-suppressing medications (TNF alpha blockers like Remicade or Enbrel), reduced their risk of getting diabetes.
Sounds great. We have an explosion of diabetes. By 2020, one in two Americans could either have pre-diabetes or diabetes. The authors said "there is evidence suggesting a possible role for ... immunosuppression in diabetes prevention." But the side effects of these drugs are overwhelming infection, increased cancer risk and death. And they cost about $50,000 per year, per patient. Were the authors serious about using these drugs for diabetes, another lifestyle and social disease?
Yes, diabetes is an inflammatory disease. And yes, reducing inflammation can prevent and even reverse diabetes. But it won't be by taking aspirin, Advil, or some high-powered immune suppressing, toxic, expensive medication. The major cause of inflammation is our processed, high-sugar, low-fiber, fast food, junk food, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor industrial diet and our couch-potato lifestyle. A plant-based, whole foods, real-food diet without sugar and flour in pharmacologic doses along with anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats and a good dose of exercise can dramatically reduce the risk of and even reverse heart disease and diabetes. And they cost a lot less.
Last week, a study in JAMA found that the risk of diabetes, heart attacks and death increased significantly with more than two hours of television watching per day. The average American spends seven to nine hours in front of a screen every day. We have a social problem, a host of chronic diseases driven by a food industry and screen-dominated culture and the breakdown of communities. Cooking real food takes a bit more time, but people spend more time watching cooking shows on television than actually cooking.
The answer to our exploding health care costs and burgeoning chronic disease is not going to be found at the bottom of a pill bottle, but at the end of our forks and the soles of our shoes. Please save us from Pharmageddon.
Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.
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Jacob Teitelbaum, M.D.: Are Cholesterol Medications Really Just A Scam?
I have no issue with those who "quote the literature", I do have an issue when they do not understand the underlying limitations of the study and misinform those who need the information most.
most diabetics live a fairly normal life, but a cardiac event could be fatal immediately.
What is also unsettling is the high rate of diabetes in impoverished communities, like the one that I live in and the rate amongst African-Americans: http://michaelmaczesty.blogspot.com/2011/06/unzipping-obesity-by-zip-code-and-race.html
Look at the research (again) released just this week and today re: ALL the previous scourges and the result on each with regards to vitamin D supplementation?
Sooner or later everyone will figure it out.
What other possibility, in the nick of time, will reduce chronic disease health costs by 30-40%?
If you are not maintaining 50-80 ng/ml, 25 OH, of vitamin D you'll get sick, in record time.
PERIOD!
However, the numbers from the study imply that statin treatment leads to avoiding a heart attack for 1 in 150 patients every year, whereas only 1 in 500 every year becomes diabetic. So, every year your chance of avoiding a heart attack is about three times greater than your chance of becoming diabetic. It's not obvious that avoiding the drugs is necessarily a good decision for the confirmed sedentary community.
And doctors are just as much to blame because you should have had the background in biology and biochemistry to know that cholesterol is a necessary substance in the human body and that the last thing you should be doing is reducing it.
I learned a few years ago that you don't even have to be a science major to go to medical school. What the heck is this crap? (Mentally replace the appropriate words with even more appropriate naughty language that'd get me banned here, 'cause that's just what I'm thinking.) You mean to tell me an English major with just enough science classes to meet the minimum standard for medical school might be presuming to give me nutritional or medication advice? After taking (bribes) free pens and free lunches from pharmaceutical reps? Seriously?
We are in so much trouble. People, get your noses out of the TV and crack a book or two. I learned that statins are dangerous completely *outside* of the doctor's office. It's not hard. I promise.
That is ridiculous reasoning. If you had any background in biology and biochemistry you would know that. Just because you need a certain amount of a substance doesn't necessarily mean you can never have too much. In fact, it NEVER means that. Too much of any necessary substance, even water is harmful. Cholesterol is necessary in cellular membranes and for hormonal functions, but stresses the circulatory system, and excessively elevated amounts lead to damage. Just like statins help the heart, but may inhibit some pancreatic functioning. Besides that, humans are capable of manufacturing all the cholesterol they need on their own, so your point is senseless as well.
"you don't even have to be a science major"
Pre-meds have to do very well on the MCATs to get into medical school, so if their pre-reqs don't cover aspects of the material in sufficient detail, they will have to teach themselves effectively or they will get rejected. If they do get in, they then have to spend the next two years learning nothing but anatomy, histology, biochemistry, embryology, etc. Then they will have to pass Step 1 of their licensing exam before they can continue on to their 3rd year.
And undergraduate science classes have almost no relevance to the med school basic sciences curriculum anyways. That is like mocking a chef at a nice restaurant for not having worked at McDonalds in high school.
It's unfortunate that doctors would rather reach for a prescription pad than tell their patients to try doubling (or tripling) their water intake first.
Seriously?
My former stepmother told me the other day that her doctor wanted her to go on a cholesterol-reducing diet. Her total was 218. 200 is normal. I couldn't believe it.