By Warren Bell, MD (reprinted with author permission)
Lost in all this heated discussion of OTC statin use is the whole
issue of the appropriate role of drugs as a treatment for what is
manifestly a disease of lifestyle in 95% of cases.
It is interesting to see that the FDA has, without comment, shifted
its ground (unless, of course, it was already there beforehand) to a
discussion of drug therapy in an utter therapeutic vacuum -- just what
the industry wants it to do! No mention of the relative value of
exercise, diet, stress, non-drug biological supplements or dietary
augmentation (e.g. garlic), or environmental influences (one scientist
proposed that heart attacks in Los Angeles on "bad air days" be called
'lung attacks' instead).
In the feeding frenzy around OTC vs Rx availability, we are losing our
sense of proportion, and along with it, our humanity. Here's a little
more evidence along these lines.
The latest issue of Nutrition Action, the newsletter of the Centre for
Science in the Public Interest, discusses the safety of supplements.
CSPI is a fine organization, founded out of Ralph Nader's many
anti-corporate activities, and usually quite enlightened and
hard-hitting in its perpective. Yet the CSPI, in this issue,
recommends that children and pregnant women avoid taking garlic and
soy isoflavones supplements "until more research is done". The article
does acknowledge that "most reactions are rare: in some cases they are
based on just one or two reports from physicians". But even allowing
for the modest difference in supplementary formulation vs food
sources, is this not amazing overkill?
There are dozens of reports of statins causing severe and even fatal
reactions. One member of this class, Bayer's Baycol, is off the market
because it was the worst of the lot, but the others all do this to
some degree -- it's inherent in their mode of action. They all deplete
stores of co-enzyme Q10, which is a critical metabolic element in a
wide variety of physiological processes.
How many people have turned up in a critical care setting with
"garlic-induced fulminant hepatitis", or "soy isoflavone-related
dementia"?! How many people end up in the ER with exercise-induced
renal failure? (I'm talking about exercise when "used as directed by
recognized experts"😉. How many folks haunt the ICU with
"square-dancing-related pulmonary fibrosis"? How about "music-induced
hyperkalemia"?
We're going nutty, driven by a corporate agenda that wants us to see
"a pill for every ill" as the only way to fly. OTC, Rx, coin-operated
machines, free give-aways -- industry doesn't care, as long as our
first thought, when we feel unwell, is to take a drug.
I believe there is a universal rule of biochemistry underlying all
this. Molecules (and the behaviours that produce them) that have been
around for a few million years, and tested empirically by billions of
people without discernible adverse effects beyond highly predictable
or nuisance ones (garlic breath, exercise-induced fatigue,
music-related procrastination, love-induced foolishness) are likely to
safe. Molecules invented a few months, years, or decades ago by a
person who's primary goal is to find a patentable substance that is
safe enough to make it through a mickey-mouse testing process onto the
market where it is likely to produce billions of dollars of profit --
such molecules are unlikely to be safe, and are potential causes of
"stealth" reactions that are unpredictable and dangerous.
I know there's always exceptions, but I believe the general rule still
holds.
And we haven't even mentioned the fact of the industrial world
siphoning most of the world's resources in order the create the
conditions of super-excess of everything that allow "diseases of
affluence" to happen in the first place, and also provide the
materials for a huge chemical industry to develop around it. And then
using force of arms or threat thereof to maintain this obscene
imbalance.