Just how accurate and informative was BBC2’s Horizon program on Wednesday that aimed at scientifically answering the question: which is more deadly: Eating lots of sugar or lots of fat? The format was to feed two doctors who were also identical twins – Alex and Chris – unlimited amounts of one or the other. Alex got a low carb/high fat diet while Chris followed the traditional low fat/high carb diet with added the sugar. (Read more…)

Unfortunately for the rest of us today’s medical research is not driven by an abstract search for objective truth but by the need to produce a product. Unless there is a drug at the end of promising new line of research it’s unlikely to attract funding from the biggest payers – the drug companies. Instead it will be parked with the comment that it needs more research, the funding for which will be virtually impossible to obtain, however effective it is. (Read more…)

For years official advice on how best to protect yourself from heart disease has been wonderfully simplistic: high levels of ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol are the major cause, so cut your risk by lowering LDL cholesterol production as much as possible with statin drugs.
Now it turns out that this advice was wrong. Not just according to long-term statin critics but it’s admitted by drug companies themselves. (Read more…)

Rarely have I been proven wrong quite so fast. After confidently informing the world that the post-statin cholesterol lowering drugs PCSK9 inhibitors would be launched upon an unsuspecting public in the near future, with billion dollar marketing budgets, it seems that I was wrong. Although who knows, I may be wrong about being wrong. (Read more…)

An era is coming to an end. Statins, the world’s most widely prescribed and profitable drugs, have, with the exception Crestor (rosuvastatin), all come off patent and their price has plummeted. Good news for NHS accountants not so good for company profits. (Read more…)

The ‘Cochrane Collaboration’ is an international collective of researchers whose self-proclaimed role is to provide accurate and robust appraisals of health interventions. The group specialises in ‘meta-analyses’: the grouping together of several similar studies on interventions including drug therapies…

Dr Kendrick has been warning about the almost total lack of effectiveness of statin drugs for over a decade during which time the number of prescriptions written for these drugs in England alone has more than doubled from from 25 million to over 50 million. (read more…)