Beware of 'new statin' drug PR in a newspaper near you

[Brownlow]

It's started...the big PR push to sell the replacement of statins...It appears in the form of a newspaper article. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

dailymail.co.uk/news/articl...

Unusually for the DM, the comments section is rife with posters tearing strips off the article and the drug. There is hope that people will not be fooled! One comment name-checks Malcolm Kendrick's book The Great Cholesterol Con and Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma.

[Pinkpeony]

Beware of Big Pharma bearing gifts !

[humanbean]

This article by Dr Kendrick is worth reading, after you've read the DM article :

drmalcolmkendrick.org/2015/...

[Brownlow in reply to humanbean]

I read that a while ago and you're right, it suits the DM article perfectly!

[humanbean in reply to humanbean]

From the DM article :

"Dr Adie Viljoen, consultant at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, said: 'Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death and at the moment we don't have much to offer people who can't use statins.'"

This is true if you only consider men to be important. For women the top cause of death is actually Dementia and Alzheimer's. Look at figure 1 on this page :

webarchive.nationalarchives...

[Brownlow in reply to humanbean]

That's really interesting Humanbean. Many drugs have never even been tested on women which is pretty shocking. The same dosages are often prescribed for women for certain drugs despite no clinical trials on how they might effect a female.

[Butterfly65]

My husband was prescribed Statins for high cholesterol a few weeks back but after I'd read so many negative comments about them on here he binned them. 

[Glynisrose]

NO-ONE needs statins they are a con.