Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

HCR -- Regarding Statins and Cholesterol

By John Ballard



My first ever Medicare physical last year cost me four hundred dollars to discover I am in good health.
(The idea of getting sick now scares the hell out of me.)
Meantime,  my high blood pressure is under control thanks to a drug with no generic equivalent that costs over a dollar a day for one pill. Next year (and no, I didn't go back after three months like the doctor said) I'm gonna find a different doctor and ask for a less costly generic drug for hypertension. And I decided after the first couple of weeks to stop taking the statin drug he prescribed.I am at risk now for being labeled "non-compliant."
Ask me if that bothers me any more.



I am a satin skeptic. This is part of the reason why.  



While doctors have known for some time that statins can help people with established heart disease ward off a second heart attack, and prevent death, the alleged life-saving benefits of cholesterol drugs to healthy people has been in dispute for many years. A second study also published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a major medical journal, found that JUPITER, a trial of the drug rosuvastatin or Crestor in healthy people, was basically unreliable.


The debate hasn't stopped the juggernaut pushing the use of statins in healthy people. Statins are the fourth most prescribed class of drugs in Canada. In 2009 Canadians bought more than 31 million prescriptions for cholesterol-lowering drugs spending more than $2.6 billion in the process according to pharmaceutical data firm IMS Health.


While there may be no overall lifesaving effect of statins, one wonders what other health effects they might have. Statins can have some troublesome adverse effects, some which are fatal.


Muscle weakening and muscle pain are among the best-known side effects of the statins. A national health survey in the United States found that people who took statins were 50-per-cent more likely to have back or leg pain.


Statin manufacturers state in their product labels that statins pose rare but real risks for rhabdomyolysis (the medical term for severe muscle breakdown that can result in kidney failure). Elevated liver enzymes -a sign of liver injury -develop in about one in 100 statin users.


Other unpleasant side effects include sleep disturbances, sexual dysfunction, depression, confusion, short-term or "working" memory loss and transient global amnesia.


The medical journal The Lancet recently reviewed several major statin studies and found that the drugs increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, on average, by nine per cent.

�


Cholesterol-lowering criticism used to be relegated to a smallish band of cholesterol skeptics. But no longer. Cholesterol questioning has gone mainstream. I have said this before and this recent research begs me to say this again: Someday we will look back on society's zeal for checking and chemically altering our blood cholesterol in the same way we now regard blood letting and purging: A medical barbarity that good science cannot support.


More at the link.

But don't take my word for it. Do your own homework and make your own decisions.



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)