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The Truth About Deadly Cholesterol Lowering Drugs. By NHF President Maureen Kennedy Salaman June 2003 |
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Daily, the trillion dollar pharmaceutical
industry sells us on "one-shot," "one-pill" cures through
seductive, cheerful, government-subsidized advertisements
offering good-health fairy tales at the pop of a pill.
Our citizens are brainwashed daily into
believing that pharmaceutical drugs are the path to vitality
and a symptom-free life, while in fact they are killing us in
numbers that compete with the loss of life of our troops in
World War II.
Data from such mainstream sources as the
American Association of Poison Control Centers, the National
Center for Health Statistics, the Journal of the American
Medical Association, the Centers for Disease Control, and the
FDA reports 140,000 people a year die from adverse drug
reactions! That's the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every
single day.
And it makes prescription drugs the fourth
leading killer in the U.S., after heart disease, cancer and
stroke.
The fact that pharmaceutical companies are
determined to offer answers to our epidemic of heart problems
is not surprising considering the potential for financial
gain. Coronary artery disease is the number one killer of men
and women in the United States. It is the leading cause of
death among women after the age of 60 and in men after 40.
Pharmaceutical marketing campaigns have
been tragically successful. The sale of prescription drugs has
more than doubled in the U.S. during the past ten years. In
1990, Americans spent $37.7 billion on prescriptions. In 1997,
national spending on prescriptions reached 78.9 billion.
Prescription drugs are the fastest-growing portion of
health-care costs, having risen at the rate of 17 percent per
year for the past few years.
Depriving the heart of Coenzyme Q10 is like
removing a spark plug from your engine -- it just won't work.
Low levels of CoQ10 are implicated in virtually all
cardiovascular diseases, including angina, hypertension,
cardiomyopathy and congestive heart failure.
Merck, the manufacturer of Mevacor and
mevinolin (lovastatin), has known this for years. In 1990,
Merck sought and received a patent for Mevacor and other
statin drugs formulated with up to 1,000 mg of coenzyme Q10 to
prevent or alleviate cardiomyopathy, a serious condition that
can cause congestive heart failure.
However, they haven't brought these
combination products to market, nor have they educated
physicians on the importance of supplementing CoQ10 to offset
the dangers. And because they hold the patent, other drug
companies are prevented from coming out with a statin/CoQ10
product.
Just because the doctor offers you a
prescription doesn't mean you have to take it. When you visit
your doctor and he hands you a page from his prescription pad,
don't be afraid to ask why. Don't be afraid to throw it away
on your way out. Don't be afraid to find another doctor who
knows how to help the body heal itself. You won't lose your
health insurance and your doctor probably won't know you
didn't have it filled. You have the choice.
Despite what should be common knowledge,
health-compromising statins were prescribed almost 100 million
times in the U.S. last year. The consumer watchdog group
Public Citizen analyzed the Food and Drug Administration's
side-effect registry and linked 72 fatal and 772 non-fatal
cases of muscle breakdown, known as rhabdomyolysis, to all six
of the statins sold between October 1997 and December 2000.
Medical consumers and the FDA have been led
by the nose so long that pharmaceutical companies aren't
afraid to admit their drugs kill. Bayer AG and the FDA
revealed that 31 people had died after taking Bayer's product,
cerivastatin.
Now its time to let the Highway Patrol in
on it.
A study published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association in 1996 (275:55-60, Jan. 3, 1996)
found that all members of the two most popular classes of
lipid-lowering drugs (the fibrates and the statins) cause
cancer in rodents, in some cases at levels of animal exposure
close to those prescribed to humans.
Last year the Bayer Corp. of Pittsburgh
voluntarily pulled from the market its cholesterol-lowering
drug Baycol (cerivastatin), which was initially approved in
the United States in 1997 (www.bayerpharma-na.com). The drug
was removed from the market, with the support of the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (www.fda.gov/medwatch/index.html;
search for Baycol), because its use was significantly
associated with a type of acute, severe muscle destruction
known as rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdomyolysis, which not only destroys
muscles but can lead to death as a result of the effects on
kidneys and circulation of muscle breakdown, has long been
associated with statins. However, Baycol has shown a greater
association with this problem than have other statin
compounds.
Some doctors today are convinced that the lower one's
cholesterol, the better. If your cholesterol is too low you
have an increased risk of mood disorders, depression, stroke
and violence. Artificially lowering cholesterol is dangerous
because we need cholesterol to manufacture sex hormones,
vitamin D, DHEA and cell membranes. Lowering cholesterol
artificially affects mental acuity and severely disables the
ability to cope with physical and mental stress.
Studies have shown a three to 13-fold rise
in violent deaths among people taking cholesterol lowering
drugs. This is not surprising when you realize that
cholesterol is vital to the nervous system and too-low
cholesterol triggers brain chemistry changes. Cholesterol
levels directly affect the activity of serotonin, a brain
neurotransmitter implicated in the control of violent
behaviors. Indications are that lowered cholesterol levels
lead to lowered brain serotonin activity and this can lead to
increased violence.
Low cholesterol is also linked to stroke
risk. In one study researchers compared the cholesterol levels
of stroke patients to 3,700 other people. They found that as
cholesterol dropped, the risk of hemorrhagic stroke increased
significantly.
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