Open Thread

Talk about colonialism in the last thread made me remember on of the books that is currently on the bookshelf I have in the den for things I am currently reading,
Burmese Days, by George Orwell.

Orwell is a long-standing favorite for me. Anything of his I have read is always engaging and eye-opening. As is so often the case with artists, his lesser-known works are usually more interesting than the works that made him famous.

In addition to Burmese Days (which seemed apt because it is a study of colonialism), he wrote a stunning/heartbreaking book about life for coal miners in the UK, Road to Wigan Pier (which is my personal favorite among his works). Another good one was Down and Out in Paris and London, which is an interesting tale of the life of a poor working stiff in Paris restaurants and on the welfare dole in the UK.

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.” –Invisible Monsters

“Why, it might be argued, should anyone think it is anything but inevitable that the preeminent schools of a capitalist society produce professionals to serve the society’s preeminent capitalist?” –Calvin Trillin

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“A systematic review and meta-analysis were undertaken of RCTs(Randomized controlled trials), published prior to 1983”

“The reductions in mean serum cholesterol levels were significantly higher in the intervention groups; this did not result in significant differences (Risk ratio .99) in CHD or all-cause mortality.”

https://openheart.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000196
——

This is a meta-analysis of corporate designed, performed, and selectively released studies on statins.
One of the authors was paid by 4 of multiple Statin drug corporations as stated in the competing interests section.

Besides conflict of interests biasing the results in favor of statins these studies contained other various flaws/bias favoring the drugs.
-Exclusion and inclusion criteria. It’s standard practice to selectively choose patients who are expected to tolerate the drugs and exclude those who are expected to have a higher risk of adverse events.
-Use of a run in period. This is where the patients are given the drug and those who have negative effects are removed before the study starts. Likewise, this results in the placebo group
receiving a period of harm from the drugs.
-Ending the study prematurely. For example the ASCOT-LLA atorvastatin trial started as a 5 year long study but it was ended after 3.3 years. Everyone could recognize how this practice was absurd when Trump called for the vote counting to stop part way through.
-Drop out bias a portion of the participants results are excluded.

The results were:
“median postponement of death for primary and secondary prevention trials were 3.2 and 4.1 days, respectively.”

Put differently, in corporate studies designed to make Statins look good they extend life expectancy by 3-4 days.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/9/e007118
—-

“Lipid-lowering drugs produce myopathic side effects in up to 7% of treated patients, with severe rhabdomyolysis occurring in as many as 0.5%”
“persistent symptoms occurred in 68% of patients despite cessation (of statins)”

Statins caused long term damage to the metabolic and muscle systems that did not resolve after withdrawing from the drugs.
This highlights the bias favoring statins in all the clinical trials because remember they gave the “placebo” group a statin for 6 weeks.
A common way drug corporations hide drug harms is to ensure that the “placebo” group is actually a group harmed in one way or another.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16671104/

——
In a 2 month long French study clinical levels of muscle pain were reported in
“10.5%” of users with 38% and 4% of those people being prevented from moderate daily activities or being confined to bed respectively.

A dose dependent relationship was found with stronger statins and doses causing larger amounts of negative effects.
The authors were employed by a statin manufacture and the study was funded by that same drug corporation (Acknowledgment section).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16453090/
—–

In a randomized study done by authors who were paid by a dozen drug companies and funded by a drug corporation grant (acknowledgment section) they found:

“35.8% experienced muscle pain on SIMVA (statins) but not placebo, exhibiting confirmed SAMS (statin-associated muscle symptoms)”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6083851/
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“Real critical thinking means uncovering and questioning social, political and moral assumptions; applying and refining a personally developed worldview” —Disciplined minds, Jeff Schmidt

“Truth is a pathless land –the moment you follow someone you cease to follow truth.” –Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” –Invisible monsters

As always sci-hub can be used to get past paywalls and read the entire published study.
https://sci-hub.se/