Sky Links, 3-1-20

President Trump Attends a Meeting and Photo Opportunity with Black Leaders

Gene Ho Interviewed by Eric Metaxas

Gene Ho, official photographer of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016, is in the studio to share a snapshot of the real man in the Oval Office, captured in his book, “Trumpography.”

Do statins really work? Who benefits? Who has the power to cover up the side effects?
-Aseem Malhotra

Tony Royle, former Virgin Atlantic pilot and now heart attack survivor decided to change his diet to a very low carbohydrate high fat Mediterranean diet and “ditch the pills” after realising the absolute benefits of statins were small. He had also suffered terrible side effects from atorvastatin which included: muscle pain, fatigue, memory disturbance and erectile dysfunction.

Tony, now an A-Leve Maths and Physics teacher is livid with the way he was presented with information. When he looked at the research himself, he found out that heart attack patients have a one in 83 chance of delaying death and a one in thirty nine chance of preventing a non-fatal heart attack from taking the drug for years.

In those without heart disease he found no increase in life expectancy at all, and a less than 1% cent chance of preventing a minor heart attack or minor stroke.

In 2009 the director of the Harding Centre for health literacy Gerd Gigerenzer in a World Health Organisation bulletin wrote that It was an “ethical imperative” that all patients were given transparent information about drug benefits. But ten years later this is still not part of clinical practice.

The British Journal of General Practice recently published an extraordinary study revealing the overwhelming majority of patients at low risk and even many at high risk, would choose NOT to take a statin when told the absolute benefit, even without mentioning side effects.

Unlike Mr Smith, Tony’s most recent coronary artery imaging shows no progression of a fifty per cent narrowing in another artery. Instead by the narrowing slightly decreasing in size it has shown possible reversal of the process despite being on no pills at all for the past three years.

The difference between the two men is that it was clear that Mr Smith had not addressed twenty years of very high stress levels that preceded his heart attack, and still continued. He described the level of stress as eight on a scale of zero to ten. I suggested mindfulness meditation and a low refined carbohydrate Mediterranean diet. He ended up looking forward to ditching the supplements he needed to take for his nutrient deficient vegan diet and eating fish and eggs again.

At the end of the consultation his wife, who had accompanied him, confessed that she had a very senior role as a pharmaceutical rep in a landmark statin trial. “we were all brainwashed as to the benefits of the drug which I now realise are marginal at best, “she said “ but I’m now certain that that the drug company redacted the side effect data before it was analysed by the researchers involved. Please don’t stop doing your work in exposing this.”