fat and heart disease shocker

Would you adamneve it? After decades of nagging patients about their cholesterol levels and prescribing statins for thousands of them, turns out it was all bollocks.

A major review published in the British Medical Journal has cast serious doubt on what has been received wisdom in the medical profession over the course of my entire career. "Lowering cholesterol with medications is a total waste of time", the article concludes, having found NO direct association between raised lipids and premature death from heart attacks and strokes, despite what I and every other doctor have been telling their patients for over thirty years.

This is a huge deal. The statins we have been prescribing by the million often have significant side effects including muscle pain, abdominal troubles and a host of other less common but highly exotic problems. Once a patient came in in a terrible state having mixed his meds with a drink of grapefruit juice- the two interacting in an alarming and sometimes dangerous way. And I hadn't even mentioned the risk to him, assuming (wrongly) that he would have read the instruction leaflet. I was lucky he didn't sue me.

Like all medical reviews, this needs to be taken with caution (and not grapefruit juice) while we await confirmation from other sources. But I have a feeling that we have not heard the last of the cholesterol debate. I have often thought doctors, under pressure from NICE guidelines, exaggerate the risk of a mildly raised cholesterol level, and when in practice I tended to under rather than over-treat. Now it looks like in the future doctors will confine themselves to treating only those patients with levels in the highest range, where it has long been known they are in real trouble if neglected. For the rest of us, perhaps we should revisit Woody Allen's words:
"Everything your grandma said was good for you is bad for you."
Will he now have to modify that to read?
"Everything your grandma said was good for you probably is."