Category: Food and Medical Politics

Cholesterol and Statins

How accurate are Professor Collins’ claims about the rates of muscle problems with statins?

I have written more than once about Professor Sir Rory Collins. He leads the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists collaboration in Oxford, UK. Periodically, this group takes (private) statin study data and churns out bold pronouncements on the (supposed) great effectiveness and safety of these drugs. Professor Collins recently tried to get the BMJ to retract two […]

August 22, 2014· 5 min read

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Cholesterol and Statins

Has Professor Collins’ call for BMJ ‘statin’ papers to be retracted backfired spectacularly?

Professor Sir Rory Collins is one of the most strident advocates of statin therapy, and also leads a ‘research group’ known as the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists collaboration (CTT). Professor Collins and his colleagues hold a huge database of from statin studies, and quite-often ‘crunch the numbers’ and pronounce statins to be highly effective and very […]

August 8, 2014· 4 min read

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Food and Medical Politics

The UK Government encourages health checks, but the evidence suggests they do no good at all

On the face of it, health checks can seem like a bit of ‘no brainer’. If you accept an invite from your doctor to attend for a ‘health MOT’ (the MOT is the annual test of car road-worthiness in the UK), then the thought is this will help ‘catch something early’, and allow earlier and […]

August 1, 2014· 3 min read

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Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome

Article questions the validity of labelling and treating people with ‘pre-diabetes’

Type 2 diabetes is a condition characterised by raised levels of glucose in the bloodstream, and its diagnosis is generally made when blood glucose levels are higher than 11.1 mmol/l (200 mg/dL) 2 hours after a oral glucose load (of 75 g). However, blood sugar control is a spectrum: between what are thought to be […]

July 18, 2014· 5 min read

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Cholesterol and Statins

French food agency sceptical about the benefits of cholesterol-reducing foods

Many readers will be familiar with cholesterol reducing ‘functional foods’ such as margarines and yoghurt drinks. These foods and ‘enriched’ with ‘stanols’ or ‘sterols’: substances that have a similar chemical structure to cholesterol, and help inhibit its absorption from the digestive tract into the bloodstream, These substances do indeed have some capacity to reduce cholesterol […]

July 11, 2014· 3 min read

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Cholesterol and Statins

How do statin proponents deal with debate? They stifle it.

Last month, one of my blog posts featured a letter written by a group of doctors, expressing their concerns about the mooted expansion of statin therapy. The letter detailed six major objections to the plan, including the mass-medicalization of millions of healthy individuals, the unreliability of the evidence regarding the adverse effects of statins, and […]

July 4, 2014· 4 min read

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Cholesterol and Statins

More evidence points to statins as a potential cause of heart failure

The debate about the safety of statins continues to rage, with some researchers claiming that they are essentially no more harmful that placebo. In reality, though, the evidence on which these claims are based is flawed for several reasons. Here are just some of those reasons: 1. Commercial sponsors of clinical trials may not be […]

June 27, 2014· 5 min read

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Food and Medical Politics

The BMJ launches a fantastic initiative to involve patients in the peer review process

I’ve long believed that if we want to make true advances in medical care, the views of patients and ‘ordinary people’ need to be taken more into account. I sometimes think that too much research is driven by self-serving interests (sometimes financial, sometimes not), and that the people supposed to benefit get marginalised or completely […]

June 18, 2014· 3 min read

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Cholesterol and Statins

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right (why won’t those calling for statin papers to be retracted use some science?)

On 21 May my blog featured calls by Professor Sir Rory Collins for the retraction of two articles that raised issues about the safety of statins. In both articles, evidence from a particular study was misrepresented and misquoted. The BMJ has withdrawn the comments and even featured them in an editorial. But Professor Sir Rory […]

June 11, 2014· 6 min read

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Food and Medical Politics

Update on my complaint about the NHS Choices article on carbohydrate: more questions than answers

In February, I wrote a blog post which aimed to draw attention to, in my view, the bias and lack of balance in an article on the NHS Choices website entitled ‘The Truth About Carbs’. I complained about this article, and had filled out the requisite form here. You’ll see that any complaint can be […]

May 22, 2014· 18 min read

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