In addition to all the good press, statins have also taken a number of hits, but a recent article may have reached a new low by blaming statins for the financial breakdown. Here is how the article, Cholesterol Contrarians Question Cult of Statins, begins:
The near-breakdown of the international financial system and the deep recession it helped create has been attributed to many causes….
Now, a Florida physician proposes an alternative explanation. Perhaps many of those supposedly sophisticated speculators who believed the party would never end were acting under the influence of drugs.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs.
“There’s a damn good possibility it’s related!” said Mark Goldstein, who has been observing his patients’ reactions to statins for the past three decades.
Now, a Florida physician proposes an alternative explanation. Perhaps many of those supposedly sophisticated speculators who believed the party would never end were acting under the influence of drugs.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs.
“There’s a damn good possibility it’s related!” said Mark Goldstein, who has been observing his patients’ reactions to statins for the past three decades.
The article appears in Miller-McCune, a magazine and website devoted to policy issues and supported by the founders of the academic publisher Sage Publications.
Although the article includes some mainstream perspective, including an email interview with JUPITER’s Paul Ridker, the vast majority of the text, written by “veteran journalist” Tom Jacobs, repeats a litany of statin criticism familiar to anyone who has monitored the field over the years. Although Jacobs acknowledges that “Goldstein’s provocative thesis” is “highly speculative,” he proceeds to repeat all sorts of accusations about statins, with little or no critical perspective or alternative viewpoints.
The article relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. In once case Jacobs cites UCSD researcher Beatric Golomb, who tells about “an emeritus professor at a major university with an IQ of over 180 who lost the ability to read a page” after starting a statin. “Then his wife took him off the statin. For him, it took two years before he experienced full recovery.”
Editorial comment: I confess to an initial reluctance to draw attention to this article, as just mentioning it may help serve to further the agenda of the extremists and nut cases. In my former incarnation as editor of TheHeart.Org one of my least pleasant duties was patrolling the forum section to prevent the monomaniacal anti-cholesterol pit-bulls from hijacking and destroying the mainstream discussion we wanted to encourage on the site. Recently the same crowd has attempted and been rebuffed in their efforts to infiltrate the blessedly quiet discussion section here. But just ignoring them won’t make them go away. I believe that the mainstream medical community needs to be aware of these sort of attacks and should be prepared to respond appropriately. Finally, the notion that statins caused the financial breakdown is just too funny to ignore
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