Category: statins

Cheap Safe Remedies: Oatmeal (Cholesterol) & Deep Breathing (Blood Pressure)

Seth Roberts7 Comments

A friend who lives in New York City writes:

The doctor I had when I lived in San Diego believed in always trying the gentlest and simplest remedies before resorting to anything as drastic as drugs or surgery. My cholesterol was high and she suggested I try lowering it by eating oatmeal for breakfast every day, saying it didn’t work for everybody but a lot of her patients had been able to avoid going on statins that way. “But I hate oatmeal,” I whined, like a sulky child. She said perhaps I would get used to it; wouldn’t it be better than being dependent on medications for the rest of my life? So, reluctantly, I bought some Quaker Oats and gave it a try. The results were dramatic — my cholesterol numbers were “perfect” the next time I had a blood test. Dr. Yu was right about getting used to oatmeal, too — I actually like it now, and look forward to my daily bowl.

Perhaps inspired by my success with the oatmeal, I also lowered my blood pressure myself, through breathing exercises. A friend who is into alternative medicine had told me about being advised by several of her alternative-medicine practitioners to try lowering her blood pressure in that way, so when mine was high, I just googled about lowering it until I found a site that offered free demo clips of a kind of breathing exercise geared to music — you can choose whether classical or new age. As it said on the site, they don’t work for everybody, and most people have to do them for twenty minutes daily for a couple of weeks before the benefits begin showing up at all, but some lucky folks see an immediate and drastic drop in blood pressure the first time they try. I turned out to be one of the lucky ones. For months, I did the breathing exercises daily, cued to inhale and exhale by their demo tapes, and my blood pressure stayed down. Eventually i even sprang for the CD set they were selling on the site, just because I got sick of hearing those same melodies on the free demo clips over and over. Now I’ve internalized the rhythms so I don’t need any music at all to cue me, and I can do the exercises anywhere, while doing other things, and my blood pressure has remained low. I do notice that if I ever neglect the exercises, when my life gets busy and I just forget to do them, it starts creeping up again — which is good incentive to keep them up. Basically, the exercises just consist of inhaling to a slow count of 8 and exhaling to a slow count of 16, and doing that for about 20 minutes every day. My blood pressure was around 160/90 before I started the exercises. Now it’s 120/80, just as it should be.

I also find the breathing exercises very soothing, in general. When I’m upset about something like, say, being stuck on a slow bus that is crawling through traffic while I’m in danger of being late to something and am surrounded by screeching children, I find that doing those exercises enables me to be reasonably serene and philosophical instead of miserable and angry and anxious.

Notice that by measuring her blood pressure regularly my friend (a) learned how to control it and (b) collected excellent evidence that breathing exercises help. Because individuals can easily collect such evidence — my friend did so by being lazy — a good response to “where’s the double-blind randomized trial?” is Mark Frauenfelder’s: Big Brother loves you.

Flaxseed Oil Cures Bleeding Gums in Three Days

Seth Roberts16 Comments

I am pleased by these results:

After a possibly overzealous dentist told me I need a gum graft [which may cost $3000], my husband encouraged me to start taking flaxseed oil. A few people online have reported that flaxseed oil dramatically improved their gum health, and we figured it was worth a shot.

My initial dose of flaxseed oil was two tablespoons a day, and my gums stopped bleeding and hurting within three days. This is pretty huge for me, because my gums have been bleeding since I was in junior high. [Emphasis added.] At the same time, I added using a Sonicare toothbrush and flossing a little more vigorously. Considering that I had tried these things in the past without the flaxseed oil and they only made me bleed more, I feel like the flaxseed oil is the difference maker.

I have subsequently reduced my flaxseed oil dose to one tablespoon, which I feel is more appropriate for a woman my size. I haven’t gained any weight from the flaxseed oil, which was a bit of a surprise. Taking it in the morning seems to help curb my appetite by at least the 130 calories it consumes.

The online reports she mentions are from this blog. A recap: Because of the Shangri-La Diet, one evening I took four or five flaxseed oil capsules. The next morning, I was surprised to notice that putting on my shoes standing up, which I’d done hundreds of times, was much easier than usual. This suggested that the flaxseed oil had improved my balance. I started to carefully measure my balance and varied my flaxseed oil intake. My measurements showed that variations in amount of flaxseed oil really did affect my balance. They also suggested the best dose. My balance improved up to a dose of 3 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. So the best dose was about 3 tablespoons per day. I blogged about this.

Tyler Cowen, inspired by my results, started taking 2 tablespoons/day. A month later, he no longer needed gum surgery. Knowing nothing about my flaxseed oil intake or Tyler Cowen’s results, my dentist told me my gums were in excellent shape, better than ever. My sister’s gums showed similar improvement. Tucker Max noticed his gums stopped bleeding after he started taking flaxseed oil. He’d had bleeding gums most of his adult life. Nothing else had helped. He also found training injuries healed faster. When he stopped drinking flaxseed oil, his gums soon got worse. Carl Willat noticed dramatic gum improvement. Joyce Cohen had excellent results (her gums were “in great shape — better than ever”). Tim Beneke and Jack Rusher had similar results. Gary Wolf, on the other hand, didn’t like the mental effects. A recent epidemiological study found a weak correlation between inflamed gums and omega-3 intake.

What have I learned? Above all, that such a pattern of results is possible. These results suggest there was/is a big hole in the usual nutritional ideas. Tyler Cowen, me, my sister, etc., were eating a conventionally “good diet” yet there was a lot of room for improvement, both in brain function and overall inflammation level. (I’m sure flaxseed oil heals gums because it reduces inflammation.) And improvement wasn’t hard — there was a simple fix. In other words, omega-3 deficiency is very common. The conventional deficiency diseases, such as scurvy and pellagra, were/are rare. They appeared only under extreme conditions with very limited diets (e.g., prison, long sea voyage). Yet just as scurvy and pellagra are easily cured, there is a simple cure for omega-3 deficiency: about 2 tablespoons/day of flaxseed oil. (Perhaps ground flaxseed is an even better source.)

Other facts support the idea of widespread omega-3 deficiency. When gums are very red, and bleed very easily, it’s called gingivitis. According to this article, ” estimates of the general prevalence of adult gingivitis vary from approximately 50 to 100%”. Heart disease is common. There’s plenty of evidence that heart disease is caused by inflammation (gated). For example, it’s well-known that inflamed gums correlate with heart disease. Statins may reduce heart disease — to the mild extent they do — because they reduce inflammation.

I also learned that psychology can help improve general health (too much inflammation causes all sorts of problems, as Tucker Max’s experience suggests). My background in experimental psychology made it easy for me to measure balance. I also found other mental tests were sensitive to flaxseed oil. These mental tests were like an animal model in the sense that they made helpful experiments (e.g., different doses) much easier. My friend Kenneth Carpenter, in his book about the discovery of Vitamin C (gated), stressed the importance of an animal model of scurvy. Once the best dose of flaxseed oil (for me) was known, it turned out to be easy to take a dose that produced dramatic improvement (in others).

The idea that psychology and self-experimentation can improve overall health is new. I presented my flaxseed oil results at a meeting of the Psychonomic Society a few years ago. After my talk, one member of the audience, a professor of psychology at Illinois State University, angrily complained that my talk was “pop culture” — not even pop psychology — and said I shouldn’t have been allowed to speak. He thought I had made elementary mistakes.

Flaxseed oil better than fish oil. Bad results of flaxseed oil.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Six Signs of Profound Stagnation in Health Care

Seth Roberts19 Comments

In a recent interview, Tim Harford, the Underground Economist, said,

That’s what makes medicine such an effective academic discipline.

By “that” he meant certain methodologies, especially randomized experiments. I disagree with this assessment. My opinion is that health care is in a state of profound stagnation, unable to make much progress on major problems.

Here are six signs of the stagnation in health care (by which I mean everything related to health):

1. The irrelevance of Nobel Prizes. Year after year, the Nobel Prize in medicine is usually given for research that is so far useless (e.g., teleomere research) or irrelevant to major health problems.

2. The obesity epidemic. Starting in 1980, obesity rates climbed fast. Thirty years later, doctors seem to know no more about how to cure obesity than in 1980. Low-fat diets, popular in the 1980s, are still popular! Low-carb diets are ancient — the Banting diet became popular in the 1860s.

3. Ancient treatments for depression still popular. SSRIs were introduced in 1988. Cognitive-behavioral therapy began in the 1980s, combining earlier ideas. Neither works terribly well — and notice how different they are.

4. The high cost of ineffective care. Americans pay much more for health care than people in other rich countries, yet American health is no better. All that new technology that Americans are paying for isn’t helping. In an article complaining about our education system, Joel Klein, the former head of New York City schools, wrote, “unlike in health care . . . in education, despite massive increases in expenditure, we don’t see improved results.” Actually, that’s exactly what we see in health care when we compare America to other countries. Tyler Cowan makes this point in The Great Stagnation.

5. Statins. A defender of modern medicine would claim that statins were an important innovation. They are heavily prescribed, yes. Yet in recent tests they have been stunningly ineffective — so much so that the earlier favorable evidence has been questioned.

6. The stagnation has become invisible — the normal state of affairs. Allowing Harford to make that comment. Harford, like Dr. Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre (whom Harford praises), believes you judge science by whether it follows certain rules. By making various rules (e.g., the need for placebo controls) and then following them, medical researchers have drawn attention — at least Harford’s and Goldacre’s — away from lack of progress. They’re making progress, they say, because they’re following self-imposed rules. Well, what if the rules make things worse? (For example, placing high value on placebo controls may draw attention away from non-pill treatments.) Better to judge by results.

What do you think are the clearest signs of health-care stagnation — if you agree with me about this?

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Statins Reduce Cholesterol But Not Heart Disease Progression

Seth Roberts26 Comments

The notion that high cholesterol (more specifically, high “bad” — LDL — cholesterol) causes heart disease may be as widely accepted as the notion that humans have caused dangerous global warming. It is much easier to test, however. An excellent study published in 2006 compared two groups of people at risk for heart disease: those given a high dose of statins and those given a low dose. The high dose reducd LDL cholesterol levels; as it was meant to; the low dose did not. But there was no effect on coronary heart disease progression. After a year of statins, persons in both groups had increased their coronary artery calcification score by the same amount — about 25%. Totally contradicting the cholesterol hypothesis.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that after a year of eating butter (half a stick per day), my coronary artery calcification score decreased 24%. Because increases of about 25% are the norm, my score was about 50% less than expected. Decreases are very rare, I was told.

Thanks to Hyperlipid. Statin side effects.

How Wonderful is Lipitor? (continued)

Seth Roberts5 Comments

In response to my previous post about Lipitor, someone named Brian commented:

I recently stopped taking Zocor [a statin, like Lipitor, and the most prescribed anti-cholesterol drug]. I started taking it at the same time I started using a CPAP machine to treat sleep apnea. While my sleep was more restful, I remained fatigued. After a year of Zocor, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Following this diagnosis, I tried a string of medications — adderall, stratera, and ritalin. I even became depressed and was put on an SSRI. My memory and mental prowess faded and became extremely spotty at best. I would use IQ apps on my iPhone to measure my mental prowess — and usually scored in the 75-100 range! (Prior to Zocor, similar computerized IQ tests would yield answers from the 130s to the 170s.) . . .

So I quit taking Zocor. (Initially, I tried using COQ10 to moderate the effects, but it proved ineffective.) . . . My mind is back, as are my computerized IQ scores. I no longer arbitrarily stop talking in the middle of sentences after losing my train of thought.

Apparently Zocor caused serious mental problems. Is this rare or common? Common. Here is an article about it. The idea that statins have bad mental effects is old. At first it was dismissed. Here is one dismissal:

The issue of low serum cholesterol and depression was directly examined in three randomized, placebo controlled trials of statins in which indices of depression were measured in all the participants—a total of 7400 people taking active treatment and 2400 taking placebo. Depression was no more common among those taking active treatment.

Apparently these three large randomized placebo-controlled trials got the wrong answer. Curious.

Perhaps statins cause mental impairment in everyone. Everyone’s brain uses cholesterol. If you are going to start or stop taking a statin (such as Zocor or Lipitor) and would like to learn how the drug affects/affected your mental function, please contact me. I am interested in helping you do that.

In the top 15 most prescribed drugs, Lipitor (#7) was the only non-generic. The profits are large, the benefits small and plausibly outweighed by the costs. There is great room for improvement in determination of how much Lipitor and other statins impair mental function.

How Wonderful is Lipitor?

Seth Roberts6 Comments

John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, understands clearly the poor judgment of economics professors. In How Markets Fail he said the Nobel Prize in Economics has made things worse, because it has often been given for worthless work. Outside of economics, however, he can write this:

during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry [the financial industry] that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.

That such a smart well-informed non-party-liner can believe Lipitor is wonderful shows Orwell was right: with enough repetition, people can be convinced war = peace. Here is the truth about Lipitor:

Statin therapy is extremely efficient in lowering cholesterol numbers, but unfortunately not without adverse effects on the body. To prevent a first heart attack, for every life that is saved – 1% over 10 years of use – statins cause an equal number of adverse deaths due to accidents, infection, suicide and cancer — 1% over 10 years’ use and significantly greater levels of serious side effects and suffering. . . . In a study to see the effects of raising the Lipitor levels from 10 to 80 mg (more sales) on patients, those taking 80 mg had increased liver problems, that is the rate of raised liver enzymes was six times higher than those given 10 mg of Lipitor. Even though the total deaths due to CVD in the 80 mg group was fewer (126) than in the 10 mg group (155), the total deaths due to other causes was higher in the 80 mg (158) than the 10 mg (127) group. There was no difference in the overall mortality rate.

Lipitor, the miracle drug. Taken by millions at a cost of billions. This is what happens when you — such as those in charge of health care — have little understanding of a problem: You aren’t good at solving it.

Cardiologists believe that high cholesterol causes heart attacks. Their depth of understanding was illustrated by the cardiologist at my Quantified Self talk about butter who said that the Framingham study showed that diet caused heart attacks (no, it found new correlations between heart disease and “risk factors” such as cholesterol — see also this) and that the recent reduction in heart attacks is evidence of our improved understanding (e.g., the science behind Lipitor). That a thousand other things changed over the same time period he apparently hadn’t considered. He simply couldn’t defend — at least then — his core belief that butter was bad. A cardiologist! How many thousands of people has he told to eat less butter?

Cassidy’s article about the harm done by the financial industry, from which that quote was taken, is excellent.