There were some interesting comments from Dr. Julian Whitaker in his June issue of Health & Healing. For those of you who don't know, Dr. Whitaker is a wellness pioneer. In the newsletter, he questions if cholesterol really matters. According to Whitaker:
- High cholesterol is not a reliable sign of an impending heart attack.
- Does not recommend statins because except for a very limited number of people, there is no evidence that they protect against heart attack or premature death. If you are over 65, there is no benefit at all even if your cholesterol goes down.
- Numbers Needed to Treat (NNT) - describes the number of patients who would need to be treated with a medical therapy in order to prevent one bad outcome. Experts consider an NNT over 50 to be "worse than a lottery ticket." The statin Lipitor is 100. That would mean that 100 people must be treated with Lipitor in order for just one heart attack to be prevented.
- Statins are riddled with side effects.
- Inflammation, not high cholesterol, is the primary cause of heart disease.
Steve - do these comments sound familiar? The NNT was something we had not heard about before.
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