Am I a patient or a customer?
Prescription drug patients can
become customers for life.
Links to this dissertation are found at the bottom of this page.
When do you question your doctor’s "orders”?
I have analyzed that fat-soluble
statins are indeed the cause of major health problems today. This is based on
my experience with medications and articles I have found discussing statins.
Lipitor is one of these fat-soluble statins that is used to lower serum
cholesterol by poisoning the an enzyme (HMG-CoA reductase) which is needed to
produce cholesterol, adrenal and sex hormones, memory proteins and maintain
cell energy. The highest concentration of cholesterol in the body is found in
the brain.
Why would ‘they’ want to do
that? ‘They’ say that if one is at risk, these statins will prevent heart
attacks—Lipitor could not prove this and removed those ads from TV. Lipitor
does not prevent first heart attacks and does little to prevent a second heart
attack. Without statins one will surely die—again, not proven. Actually, in
tests comparing statin users vs. non-statin users showed that people died more
from other diseases when taking a statin—mostly cancer.
See the following post for more adverse data about statins.
See the following post for more adverse data about statins.
Added to this is the issue
of beta-blockers, Ace inhibitors and alpha-channel blocker blood pressure meds.
These all have side effects including liver and sleep issues. Having difficulty
falling or staying asleep, or insomnia, is one of the most common side effects
of beta-blockers, they suppress nighttime melatonin
secretion. Melatonin is a hormone your body produces at night, and one of
its primary roles is to help you sleep. This may also explain why they are also
associated with an increased risk of diabetes, as this is another well-known
complication of beta-blockers and sleep impairment has been strongly correlated
with insulin disturbances.
I questioned my doctor about
this sleep problem and he said he never heard of that. He and another previous
doctor suggested Benadryl because it makes one sleepy. What? An
antihistamine?
Many years ago, I went to a
health fair and saw an exhibit of what belly fat looked like. It was a big
chunk of a brownish jelly like substance that surrounds the stomach. Yuk. I do
not think my belly was anywhere near that size at the time. Then I had a blood
test and was told I had borderline high cholesterol – I thought, “thank God
its’ only borderline”.
I have exercised and did
recreational cross-country skiing during the late 70’ and early 80’s. I quit
smoking sometime in mid-1980. I participated in long-distance bicycling in 1987
& 1988. I operated my own photography studio from 1993 to 2012.
In 1995, I was ‘convicted’ of
coronary heart disease and open-heart surgery was just about mandated. I
declined and got a second opinion, opting for two procedures of stent
placements. This was done with the addition of statin and blood pressure
medications. With this procedure, I thought I was ‘cured’, but as a patient I
received what was to be a life sentence on these meds.
On a follow up appointment I
discussed my ‘breathlessness’ when I started walking on my treadmill. I would
then stop for a few minutes and was able to resume without getting out of
breath. The doctor explained that the arteries on the backside of my heart were
totally blocked and new capillaries replaced those blocked arteries. They were
expanded with exercise, which enabled me to continue.
At another appointment, I
asked when I could stop taking these meds and was told that I wouldn’t want to
do that. This was because there was new evidence that the statin (Lipitor) had
many more benefits than just to prevent heart attacks, and that would be good
for patients. Would you believe at one time that Pfizer wanted to put Lipitor in our water supply?
Later, with a new
cardiologist, I asked again when I could discontinue the meds and was told that
I would have to ‘diet and exercise’. I thought ‘what diet and what exercise” and
needed some direction. Nada.
Then came the third stent
procedure several years later with yet another cardiologist. This procedure was
successful in that it resolved the breathlessness issues, but it did not go
without complications. Without my knowledge, this doctor used a drug eluting
stent, which needed a blood thinner to prevent blood clots from forming. Plavix
can make it easier to bleed, even from a minor injury. Without Plavix, the drug
eluting stent could become problematic.
I was given a 600mg dose of
Plavix before the procedure, and was told I would have to continue with this
medication for at least a year. The manufacturer recommendation is three to six
months depending on who the manufacturer was. The story about these stents is HERE.
What ensued was an overnight
hospital stay to insure the insertion site healed enough to walk. I woke the
next morning with increasing pain on the inside of my upper thigh. By mid-day,
the doctor came to release me. I told him about the pain and he gave me a
prescription for a painkiller. He told me the pain would go away. Well, the
pain did not go away even with the painkiller.
Since there was evidence of
internal bleeding, I was sent to a hospital for an ultra sound. The femoral artery did not clot as needed, but formed
a pseudo-aneurysm.
I returned the next morning
for an injection of thrombin, to help clot the problem area. My stent procedure
was not without risk. The leaked blood on the inside of my leg continued to
gravitate to my feet for almost a year.
These links are the full
articles to this and to other posts I have included in this series:
HEART OF THE MATTER: The Cholesterol Myth: Dietary
Villains and Cholesterol DrugWar -
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