How statistic lie: drug edition
Dr. Cate has been red-hot lately. Here's an article about how statins were "sold" to doctors:
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This also explains the staggering breadth and reach and danger of drug-related side effects; a subject which scares me every time I research it. |
The video is an eye opener in that one can assume that this is being done to promote many pharmaceuticals. It means that patients and doctors are being given unreliable information that can have serious health consequences. It's another example of how people are responsible for their own research and cannot afford to blindly follow the recommendations of medical experts. Question anything and everything one is told to put in one's body.
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This is statistics 101. If you cannot know who was excluded from a study and who was included you cannot generalize the findings to a larger group of people. It's also statistics 101 that if you want to determine if you agree with the conclusions that a study has come to you have to have the raw data along with a full description of the study design.
Doctors are trained to be clinicians and often get no education in experimental design and statistics. If the research is flawed they will not be aware of that. Jean |
Every time I read side effects of some drugs and watch those
god-awful nonstop drug commercials it reminds me that someone has suffered each bad reaction or they wouldn't list each. Just to cover themselves from liability because...they warned you! But doctors, I think they know more than you think, they're just on the gravy train...Why swim upstream when the profits are so great just going with the flow? |
It's the way doctors are trained: "there's a pill for every ill."
As I discovered in my nightmare medical journey, they have been trained to sit there, ticking off symptoms that a drug will make go away. And then they give you the drug(s). Next! But that just cancels out the symptoms. I saw a specialist and when I talked about sleep problems and exhaustion, he wanted to give me Ambien and Prozac. And Lipitor, because I was there. No tests, no diagnosis. Just a fistful of prescriptions. And when these drugs drive me back to complain about side effects, guess what? More drugs! More side effects! |
New podcast with Dr Lembke on doctor's overprescribing with more deadly consequences than statins...opioids.
http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/...addiction/27175 One tidbit...more than 50% of doctors are now salaried employees of larger group practices, which have established practice guidelines on what drugs have to be prescribed for what test results, etc. ...and how long to spend with each patient. Some doctors see 40 patients a day...easier to continue to hand out pain relief than seek the cause of pain. |
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Cheaper, too; to their way of thinking. Expensive operation/PT to fix that joint or a script to make them stop complaining about the pain... Look at the BILLIONS spent on Type II diabetes, when we all know how most of those people could fix it themselves. It drives me nuts, I tell ya. |
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Speaking about Type II diabetes, yesterday I was near two people who both had it and it was not under control. Being low carb for a couple of years now, I can smell it, it fills the air around them. Both of them were big rice eaters. But if you told them to stop eating rice, they would be horrified! |
I wandered into a ring of diabetes blogs once, and they were the nicest people, struggling with an impossible task.
They were all damning their "brittle" diabetes. They would have their carefully measured meal, with the recommended number of carbs, and take their insulin, and sometimes it would work but mostly it wouldn't. Their blood sugar would be too high, and they would take a little more insulin next time, and then it would be too low, and they would frantically eat more... Travel, special occasions, and times they had to have one more serving of their favorite stress food; all became disasters that made them sick and frantic. Always there loomed a bleak future if they couldn't get this right, and they could not get it "right." Doctors blamed them, and they blamed themselves. It is what Dr. Bernstein calls The Laws of Small Numbers. Quote:
By being told to load up on carbs, these diabetics are getting those unpredictable blood sugar levels. It was so terribly sad. This, too, is the fault of Ancel Keys and his lipid hypothesis. Since diabetics have a higher risk of heart disease, they got their fat pared even more, and pushed into hearthealthywholegrains, more. So they are dealing with diabetes and heart disease. They get statins right out of the gate. It really is horrying to step back and see it happening and know there is little I can do. That is why reforming the entire attitude is so very important. |
As a diabetic, not only is my nurse practitioner always wanting to prescribe statins but one time the pharmacy itself called me directly to see if I knew I could "benefit" from statins - not knowing anything about my blood tests, but purely on the basis of having diabetes!
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I wonder how long it takes to develop an addiction? Thirty+ years ago I had knee surgery and was in major pain for several months. I was also prescribed an opioid, and took 3-4 of them daily for months(in those pre-google days, never having heard of opioid addiction). Then one day I realized I was not in much pain anymore, so I stopped taking them. They never did anything for me except ease the pain, and when the pain was mostly gone there was no more reason for me to take any! |
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