By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

You may remember ads featuring a distinguished looking gray-haired dude, dressed in a white coat with a stethoscope, who says, “four out of five doctors recommend” some expensive medication or another for all those ailments you didn't know you had. Before or after which he will grudgingly (by law) mention, “I'm not a doctor, but...” implying you can trust him anyway, because he looks like one. Or at least Madison Avenue's notion of what one should look like.

I'm not a doctor either, but in fact the actor who was most famous for playing a doctor was a relative (Lew Ayres, as Dr. Kildare), so I should be at least as qualified as that guy on TV to address medical issues. Right? Actually, even doctors themselves, at least in the West, are not always that qualified either when it comes to addressing issues of preventive health, because they are not trained, and in fact have no incentive to keep you healthy. Their entire M.O. is focused on treating the ill, better yet, ordering and performing that triple bypass operation. The more the better because in our profit-driven medical system, in which doctors are paid by the number of procedures or operations performed (again, the more the better), keeping you well in the first place is simply not on their agenda.

Which brings us to the pharmaceutical industry and today's topic: statin drugs, such as Lipitor, now used by more than 16 million Americans to combat a made-up disease that didn't even exist twenty years ago, called Hypercholesterolemia. In today's Seattle Times, there was an article by Joe and Teresa Graedon, authors of the syndicated column, The People's Pharmacy, about the negative side effects Lipitor can have on a male partner's sex life: namely, killing it dead. Lipitor can reduce or eliminate libido entirely, and the ability to get an erection along with it. Having been through this myself in the early '90s, I can attest that a doctor's (and media-fed male patient's) typical solution to this problem is simple, take yet another drug: namely, Viagra, to counteract the effects of the first one. It's a Big Pharma sweet dream if ever there was one, two pricy drugs to cancel each other out.

Statin drugs, the family of pharmaceuticals to which Lipitor belongs, do indeed reduce cholesterol, and do it very well. For a price—and not just the one at the drug counter. Killing your libido is just the tip of the iceberg. Statins can cause side effects that can be anything from debilitating to fatal. And not just to your sex life. They can cause massive fatigue, muscle depletion, and even heart failure. Statins can cause nerve damage, including an affliction called idiopathic polyneuropathy. It produces a loss of sensation in the legs, among other symptoms, and there is growing evidence that fatal accidents involving elderly drivers, including the one at the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles in July 2003 that killed 10 people, are directly attributable to long-term use of statin or other cholesterol-reducing drugs. And now there is mounting evidence connecting statin drugs to congestive heart failure. Statins inhibit the production of an enzyme called Co-Q10, essential to healthy heart function. Amazingly, even so, almost all heart patients are put on statin drugs, even if they have low cholesterol.

Other side effects commonly caused by these statin drugs are dizziness (again a probable cause of driving accidents), cognitive impairment leading to speech and memory loss, depression (one of my own side effects, leading to yet another prescribed drug called Wellbutrin), pancreatic rot (which is as horrible as it sounds), and even cancer. In fact, according to researchers at medical centers around the world, statin use can increase the rate of breast cancer by 1500%! So it isn't just men who are at risk here.

Even more amazingly, almost no positive effects have been found to result from long-term statin use apart from cholesterol reduction. And here's where the made-up disease issue comes to the fore. I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but I come from a bloodline in which cholesterol is prevalent. Yet there is no history of heart disease whatsoever in my family. My mother had many ailments in her waning years, including dementia and very high cholesterol, in the 300 plus range. Yet she enjoyed life to the fullest, made not the slightest effort to reduce her intake of the things she loved, like butter on her bread, cream in her coffee, or dessert after dinner, and she lived to 94. My sister, her only daughter, tries to keep her sugar intake down, and that alone has enabled her to lose considerable excess weight. She is 75 and has not seen a doctor in 20 years and is in perfect health.

Now, as to that dreaded cholesterol itself. The contemporary craze to get rid of it has caused doctors to either forget or ignore their most basic undergraduate training in biochemistry 101. For one thing, it is the most basic ingredient in cell structure itself, because cholesterol is what makes a cell membrane waterproof (i.e. protects it from dissolving in a liquid base such as, say, blood?). Cholesterol is also the body's band-aid: it is the substance of scar tissue. Further, it is essential to the body's processing of minerals and even fats. People on low cholesterol diets have chronic metabolism problems in terms of digesting fats. It also plays an essential neurological role, as the conduit for carrying serotonin to the brain. It is the precursor to production of Vitamin D, and also to the production of all hormones produced in the adrenal glands, including those necessary for reducing inflammation, blood sugar levels, and the loss of which can lead to chronic illnesses such as asthma and edema, the aforementioned loss of libido, and infertility.

None of these problems, needless to say, have gotten the media attention they deserve, in large part because statin drugs are now hugely profitable and a major proportion of the pharmaceutical business, and to an uncomfortably considerable degree, the livelihood of profit-driven medical service providers, including doctors.

The People's Pharmacy writers, in responding to the wife of a patient who had lost his ability to get an erection, urged her to insist that he not give up these drugs, and to consult with his doctor about a replacement drug for Lipitor. Yet she mentioned two things he was already doing, which doctors never prescribe, yet work very well to reduce cholesterol if one really must: eating oatmeal and taking niacin. My oldest brother also had high cholesterol, and was also prescribed statins. He, too, began to suffer side effects. Living by then in Europe, he found a doctor who practiced prevention, and prescribed niacin in large doses. Niacin also has a side effect many people find annoying: it gives you a heat flush. But it also knocked his cholesterol down by 100 points in a month. And it cost maybe $10 at the nearest drug store.

Again, I am not a doctor, and am not qualified to prescribe either oatmeal (god forbid, you might choke on your cookies or something) or niacin, although I've never heard of a fatal hot flush. What I am prescribing is this: look at the whole picture. And in the case of statin drugs, it isn't pretty.

Sources: The People's Pharmacy, 10/25/2009, Mary Enig, Ph.D, & Sally Fallon, Ph.D, Weston A. Price Foundation, 6/14/2004.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.