Guess I’ll be taking a sick day.  I knew something was going on when I woke up yesterday, looked at the clock, and realized I’d slept nearly 12 hours.  Turns out I had a fever of just over 100, which is actually a three-degree fever for me, since my normal temperature has been 97 since I was a wee lad. 

No other symptoms besides the fever … no earache, no runny nose, nothing.

Today the fever crept up over 102 before sliding back a bit.  Still no other symptoms except for an occasional cough.   This has turned into a bit of an experiment with intermittent fasting, because when I have a fever, my appetite disappears. 

So it’s megadoses of vitamins C and D and some rest.  Unfortunately, this happens to be the day I have a radio interview scheduled, and I don’t want to cancel on them.  I just hope I sound coherent when they call.

My mom made her first visit to our new home in Tennessee this week.  When I told the girls she was coming down, they bounced around the house on what appeared to be invisible pogo sticks, yelling “Grandma is coming!  Grandma is coming!”  My five-year-old also offered this observation:  “I know who she is!  She’s the lady with the wrinkles and the sweet voice!”

The lady with the wrinkles and the sweet voice turned 74 yesterday.  In my humble but biased opinion, she looks great for her age.  I’m sure some of that is due to her sense of humor and her natural optimism, which she’s maintained despite years of dealing with my dad’s Alzheimer’s. 

While witnessing his decline, she’s managed to improve her own health recently.  Her fasting glucose began creeping up towards the diabetic level during the past year, so of course her doctor sent her to a nutritionist, who of course preached the wonders of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.  So of course, I told her to ignore everything the nutritionist said.  She did.

She finally read The 6-Week Cure for the Middle Aged Middle a month ago and was inspired to switch to a low-carb diet.  (Now, you might think watching Fat Head would’ve served as inspiration, but what can I say … Drs. Eades & Eades are more convincing than I am.)  She’s lost eight pounds, which is an accomplishment for a 5’2″ woman, but more importantly, she feels healthier and her blood pressure has dropped by 20 points. 

(My older brother also began reading the book while visiting Mom one afternoon and was similarly inspired.  He’s lost 13 pounds already and told her he hasn’t felt this energetic in years.)

Mom has always loved to cook — she’s very good at it — but thanks to some low-carb cookbooks, she’s learned that eating well doesn’t have to mean taste-bud deprivation.  To underscore the point, I spent Sunday afternoon making a huge pan of low-carb moussaka (you can find the recipe in the Carb Wars cookbook), which I served for dinner when my sister and my mom arrived later that evening.  Nobody missed the potatoes or fried batter that would be included a traditional moussaka recipe.  The stuff was delicious, if I do say so myself.

Mom told me yesterday she hopes she’s around to see what my girls are like in their twenties.  I believe she’ll be here, especially now that she’s bringing her blood pressure and blood sugar under control.  Genetics are certainly on her side.  Her grandmother lived to be 96.  Her mother is still alive at 93 — which, now that I think about it, may prove that optimism is overrated.  For the 51 years I’ve been alive, my grandma has been complaining about her health, imagining non-existent ailments, and predicting her own demise. 

Or she may just be a late-life optimist.  My grandma currently lives in a facility near my mom’s sister, who is only 65.  Mom and her sister floated the idea recently of moving grandma to the same facility where my dad now lives.  Grandma thought about it, then said to my aunt, “But Shirley is nine years older than you are.  If I move over by her and she dies before you, who’s going to look after me?”  When you’re worried about the consequences of outliving your senior-citizen children, I guess that’s a form of optimism.

Happy Birthday, Mom.  Here’s to 25 more.

My good friend Tom Monahan (also the composer for Fat Head) just returned from visiting his family on the east coast and was dismayed to learn that his mother is still taking statins.  She has of course seen the film, and Tom has sent her quite a bit of information explaining why statins are worthless for women, but apparently she wasn’t convinced.  Or, since Tom has also noticed her memory is fading, perhaps she just forgot everything he told her.

Statins are the most profitable drugs in history.  They’re also some of the worst.

Let’s get the big question out of the way first:  do statins work?  That is, do they prevent heart disease?  Yes … but not by much and not for any significant share of the population taking them.  They were engineered to reduce cholesterol, and they do.  But the small benefit they provide is likely due to the fact that they also reduce inflammation — and you can do that by giving up sugar and processed vegetable oils.

The only people shown to benefit from statins in clinical research are men under the age of 65 who have several risk factors for heart disease.  That’s it.  And even for them, the benefit isn’t exactly impressive.  If you watch prime-time TV for more than 10 minutes, you’ll no doubt see a commercial telling you that Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attacks by 33%.  Wow!  That’s a huge reduction in risk, right?

Hardly.  First off, if you can manage to read the fine print during the millisecond it appears on your screen, you’ll learn that the reduction is among the group I just mentioned:  relatively younger men with existing heart disease.  Millions of prescriptions for Lipitor are written for suckers — sorry, I mean patients — who aren’t 1) men, 2) known to have several risk factors for heart disease, or 3) under age 65.  In other words, people who don’t fall into the group that actually benefits.

And about that 33% reduction … I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating:  you have to understand how that figure was calculated.  Among the relatively young men with known risk factors for heart disease who took Lipitor in a clinical trial, two of every 100 had a heart attack.  Among the relatively young men with known risk factors for heart disease who took a placebo, three of every 100 had a heart attack.  Yes, that’s a 33% reduction, but it also means that for every 100 high-risk men who take Lipitor, we may at best be preventing one heart attack.

Notice I didn’t say we may be preventing one extra death.  That’s because we don’t have the figures to analyze.  The pharmaceutical companies are quick to release figures showing reductions in heart attacks, but haven’t always released the total death figures.  If that doesn’t make you suspicious, then you should expect to receive some emails from Nigerians who want to borrow your bank account to transfer a few million dollars out of Africa.

For the millions of statin-takers who aren’t men under 65 with several known risk factors for heart disease, lord only knows how many heart attacks — if any — are being prevented.  The number has to be miniscule.  And yet doctors keep prescribing statins because it makes them feel better when a patient’s “high” cholesterol level comes down. 

While the doctors may feel better, the patients often feel worse.  Even mainstream magazines like TIME are starting to figure it out.  Here are some quotes from a TIME article published a few weeks ago:

Doctors say the majority of current statin users are healthy people who don’t have heart disease but who, like Segal, simply have high cholesterol. Use among this group, known as the primary prevention population, has made these drugs one of the world’s best-selling classes.

But Segal’s statin ended up preventing her from living a heart-healthy lifestyle. A month after she started taking the drug, she suffered muscle pain so severe, she had to stop all physical activity and was unable to sleep at night. Although her husband, who was worried about her risk of heart attack, pleaded with her to stay on the drug, she discontinued using it. The muscle pain receded. “My husband was scared for me. Doctors scare you. But I was in so much pain, I told him I would have rather died than stay on them,” says Segal.

That grim situation could have been avoided, researchers say. An estimated 12 million American women are routinely prescribed statins, which carry a risk of serious side effects. Yet there is little evidence that they prevent heart disease in women. In past research, statin therapy has been shown to prolong the lives of people with heart disease. It has also been shown to stave off the onset of heart disease in healthy at-risk adults. But researchers who have broken out and analyzed the data on healthy female patients in these trials found that the lifesaving benefit, which extends to men, does not cross the gender divide. What’s more, there’s evidence that women are more likely than men to suffer some of the drugs’ serious side effects, which can include memory loss, muscle pain and diabetes.

My mom had serious muscle pain when she was taking a statin.  Her doctor never connected the pain to the statin.  I did, after doing research for the film.  Convincing her to give up the statin was one of my prouder moments.  She not only gave up the statin, she gave up the painkiller she was taking to mask the effects.

So how common are the side effects?  That depends on who you ask.  According to the pharmaceutical companies, only about 2% of patients experience side effects.  But Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a researcher at the University of California who’s been tracking statin side effects for years, says the rate could be as high as 30%.

Does this mean the pharmaceutical companies are lying?  Not exactly.  Once again, it’s a matter of how the research is conducted.  When a company like Pfizer is selecting subjects for a study, they exclude the people who have reported side effects when taking other drugs.  Sometimes researchers even give prospective patients a big, fat dose of something to see how they react.  If the reaction is something like, “Man, that made me feel like @#$%,” the prospective patient is no longer a prospective patient.

So go figure … after cherry-picking a population that’s resistant to side effects, the researchers report a low rate of negative reactions during the clinical trials.  That’s why Pfizer can refer to “rare but serious” side effects in their commercials.  I’m guessing the side effects are only rare in their clinical trials.  But they’re definitely serious, as this article in the UK Daily Mail recently pointed out:

For the first time, the level of harm posed by the cholesterol-lowering drugs has been quantified by researchers.  They found some users are much more likely to suffer liver dysfunction, acute kidney failure, cataracts and muscle damage known as myopathy.

For some patients, the risk is eight times higher than among those not taking statins. Overall, the risk of myopathy – which may be irreversible – is six times higher for men on statins and three times higher for women.

So taking a drug that does a chemical beat-down on your liver’s cholesterol-making functions can end up causing liver damage?  Well, I am shocked.   Researchers have also linked statins to diabetes, and diabetes is a huge risk factor for future heart disease.  (You have a risk factor for heart disease?  Better take this statin.)

Myopathy is medical term for weak muscles.  Statins cause myopathy because they deplete the muscles of CoQ10, and the mitochondria — the little power plants in the muscles — depend on the stuff.  Not surprisingly, after being robbed of an essential nutrient, the muscles can ache and become weak.  If it were just a matter of giving up the statins, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal.  But according to Dr. Golomb’s research, more than 2/3 of the patients who suffer statin-induced myopathy never regain the full use of their muscles.  The damaged mitochondria don’t recover.

Then, of course, there are the memory problems.  Dr. Duane Graveline, a former NASA flight surgeon whose muscles were permanently damaged by statins, also experienced day-long episodes of transient amnesia until he traced them to his daily dose of Lipitor and stopped taking it.  As I’ve written about before, my dad also suffered day-long episodes of profound confusion in his mid-60s, a few years before his Alzheimer’s became apparent.  I don’t know if Lipitor caused the Alzheimer’s, but I’m convinced it at least accelerated his decline. 

Dr. Golomb believes cognitive and memory problems are far more common than reported, but since most statin-takers are elderly (once again, a group not shown to benefit from taking them), their doctors assume they’re just having “senior moments.”  The side effects are never reported.

Add it all up, roll it over, press it flat and give it one more analysis, and you’re looking at drugs that produce a relatively small benefit among one small slice of the male population that isn’t likely to suffer negative reactions in the first place.  Meanwhile, people outside that group receive no measurable benefit (aside from making their doctors happy with their cholesterol scores) and can suffer memory problems, liver damage, kidney failure, diabetes, permanent muscle weakness, and — forgot to mention this earlier — impotence.

These are the some of the worst drugs ever.  I only wish Tom could convince his mother while she still remembers who he is.

I hope you all enjoyed your Memorial Day … and for those if you not in the U.S., I hope it was a good Monday.

I spent most of the weekend making final updates to a new software release.  It’s Tuesday morning and I still haven’t squeezed in my Monday-night sleep.  I may have to just skip a day.

While taking breaks from programming, I watched a 10-hour series on the History Channel titled “Word War II in HD.”  Lots of film footage, much of it never aired before.  One thing that struck me, besides the hell the combatants lived through, was how lean they all were.  Granted, these were soldiers, sailors and marines who’d been through basic training and months of battles … but still, it was surprising to see scenes that sometimes included dozens of shirtless men, with nary a fat body among them.  Most of them looked rock-solid.

But of course, this was also the 1940s … a decade before Ancel Keys started scaring people away from eating fat.  And just think:  they didn’t even have nutrition labels on their food.