But you missed the very early parts of this thread which had me
declaring myself a cholesterol skeptic and that I had taken myself off
Lipitor after about 8 years. I strongly encourage anyone with "high"
cholesterol and taking statins to read "The Cholesterol Myths : Exposing
the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease" by
(well published in the Lancet) Swedish physician Uffe Ravnskov.
You can get a paperback copy from Amazon for very little money. It may
change your life. Check the reviews on Amazon's page. They say it all
far better than I can.
<http://www.amazon.com/Cholesterol-Myths-Exposing-Fallacy-Saturated/dp/0967089700/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6540329-6166469?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179510323&sr=8-1>
I'm not sure I mentioned this before or not but when I first started
reading Ravnskov I was skeptical. Somewhere early in the book he made
the statement that most doctors are too busy to ever read anything
except the summary of medical papers in journals. He then claimed that
the state of the business today is such that these papers frequently
make assertions in the summary that are not supported by the detailed
data in the paper.
I thought that to be a preposterous claim. How could peer reviewed
medical journals be publishing papers with claims not supported by the
data? But before declaring him a total crackpot I decided to check for
myself. I did an online search for cholesterol/heart disease papers and
chose two small ones (only 3 pages each) at random. I deliberately
chose small ones as easy to comprehend and search for data that would
support the conclusions. Most cholesterol related stuff contains
precious little medicine most of which I don't understand. But it does
contain a lot of statistics (they say) which I do (mostly) understand.
I was astounded. Both randomly chosen papers did make claims in the
summary for which I could find no supporting data. From that point on I
decided to pay much more attention to Ravnskov.
Just to be clear, whether or not you accept the cholesterol/heart
disease hypothesis is a separate thing from discarding statins. That's
yet another very complicated issue but after studying the issue for
about two years I decided to abandon statins as well. PS: My
cholesterol was higher than yours. But today I don't care.
Want some food for thought? This is only one of a growing number of
studies that say, if you're elderly (>65), the higher your cholesterol
the longer you live. Universty of Hawaii study published in the Lancet
in 2001. Not exactly new news.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=11502313&dopt=medline>
Chuck Norcutt
Gary Holder (c) wrote:
> Dang, I'm WAY behind in this list. HAD to respond, here, though very late ,
> due to the unusual relevance of the topic, in two ways: 1)training, and
> 2)experience:
>
> 2. Cholesterol/statins: From personal experience/as a patient:
>
> Cholesterol meds: High doses of Lipitor work best for me: effectiveness of
> meds is variable across individuals, so it may be different for you.
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