Here is an analogy from the Savannah Morning News sent by a reader of my columns.

“Photos taken inside clogged city sewer pipes look nearly identical to medical photos of the blood vessels of patients who have spent a lifetime gorging on fried chicken, sausage, and bacon. "It’s like your arteries," said John Parker, environmental compliance inspector with the city’s Water and Sewer Department. "Grease builds up in there. It’s gory." And just like in the body, clogs can form little by little, the accumulation of lots of neighbors each sending a little grease down the drain.”

I shall probably be told that I am wrong, but I understand that the ducking stool was used to determine whether or not someone (usually a female someone) was a witch. The defendants were placed in the stool and lowered onto the surface of a pond. If they sank, they drowned, but were pronounced innocent. If they floated, they were witches; so they were then drowned anyway.

Other ways of determining witchery included grasping a red-hot poker. If it burned you, you were innocent; if it didn’t burn you, you were a witch. To be frank, once the powers that be had decided you were a witch, you were going to be found guilty — then killed. Or found innocent — but killed in the process. Take your pick.

There are few things that enrage us quite so much as a sense of injustice. There is nothing, for example, so anguished as the embittered cry of a five-year-old, “That’s not fair.” My usual reply to such a statement is that when you emerge from the womb, there isn’t a banner at the end of the bed stating, “Don’t worry, life will be fair.” Quite the opposite, in fact. So get used to it — and learn to play the game.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, wise medicine men decreed that cholesterol should be lowered to prevent heart disease. So the alchemists retreated to their dark laboratories, and developed magic potions such as fibrates and cholestyramine. And yeah verily, cholesterol was lowered, but the people taking these potions tended to die in higher numbers than those not taking the potions. So it was decreed that these potions should be swept under the carpet whilst no-one was looking.

It worries me sometimes that I seem to be so completely out of step with my medical colleagues. They all lower blood pressure with relentless intensity, using complex guidelines set out by ‘experts.’ They advise patients to treat the sun as a dangerous white hot ball of radioactivity, creating melanomas faster than you can say factor twenty five. They purse their lips in concern at a blood cholesterol level that would have been considered normal ten years ago.

By Dr. Peter Battershill and Alan Cassels

"Cholesterol drug best in large doses" proclaims a recent front-page headline. The text goes on to drive home the message that a recent cholesterol-lowering study has found "the strongest evidence yet that driving cholesterol down to very low levels offers additional protection from heart attacks and strokes."

There are those of us, poor misguided fools, who believe that the main point of taking drugs is to prevent an early death. We are clearly wrong. The important thing is that you must not die of heart disease. For dying of heart disease is clearly much worse than dying of something else.

I don’t know, for myself, I think a major unexpected heart attack is not a bad way to go. A sudden sharp crushing pain, then it all goes dark, then – well who knows actually. Not that pleasant, but this is a better way to go, surely, than a slow agonising death from cancer. Or maybe not, maybe we should all have a chance to prepare for death, get used to the idea….. discuss.

Imagine waking up and having no recollection of anything that happened the day before. All memory, wiped, gone. You find a letter written by yourself that you can’t remember writing. You go out to buy a present only to find, when you get home, that you had already bought it. Your next-door neighbour asks for his wheelbarrow back, the one he lent you yesterday, you look at him blankly and say you haven’t got it.

Every so often a story emerges that is just so exquisite that I have to rub my eyes and slap my cheeks to make sure I am awake, and I haven’t just dreamed it. One such story just emerged from the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans.

Basically, what researchers have found is that if you take your drugs every day, rather than missing them from time to time, you will halve your chances of dying (A bit of a meaningless statistic, as we are all going to die. I think what they meant to say is that you will halve your chances of dying during some defined time period).

I was going to write about something else, but I couldn’t resist bringing the latest results from the MONICA study to your attention (MONItor trends in CArdiovascular disease). This study has been going on for ages now. It was set up by the WHO – not the rock band - to look at heart disease rates and risk factors in twenty six countries across the world.

I was reading recently that the Intelligence community has come up with a phrase ‘groupthink’ to explain how groups of people can do really stupid or unpleasant things, whereas an individual would never go so far. When we are part of a group it seems that we can push the boundaries of far-out behaviour much, much, further.

I don’t like the word groupthink, it is functional and ugly. But it certainly is true. I have recently become fascinated by the conformity of many…most? people’s thinking, and I have been trying to work out why this happens. So I was open to the idea of groupthink before it came along.

One Contrary To The Same Company’s Aggressive Promotion Of Its Drugs To Treat High Blood Pressure And Lower Cholesterol

They say you should never explain a joke, because then it just isn’t funny any more. I quite agree, but something made me laugh over the weekend, and there is no way that I can get anyone to understand why without explaining it.

I shall attempt to set the scene.

1. Holoprosencephaly (defective septum separating lateral cerebral ventricles, with cerebral dysfunction), atrial septal defect, aortic hypoplasia, death at one month of age.
   
2. Aqueductal stenosis with hydrocephalus, concurrent limb deficiency
   
3. Cerivothoracic-to-lumbar neural-tube defect, myelocele, duplication of spinal cord, cerbellar hernation with hydrocephalus; apparent agenesis of palate
   
4. Spina bifida, right-arm abnormality
   
5. Left leg: femur 16% shorter than right side; foot: aplasia of metatarsals and phalanges 3,4 and 5; additional VACTERL (vertebral, anal, cardiac, tracheal, esophageal, renal and limb defects): left renal dysplasia, reversed laterality of aorta, disorganized lumbosacral vertebra, single umbilical artery; additional findings: clitoral hypertrophy, vaginal and uterine agenesis.

It always amazes me that some things seem to strike terror into the hearts of mankind whilst other, much more dangerous things, are accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. As my son has taken to saying ‘Yeh, whatever.’

Or How Cholesterol Doublethink Will – And Should – Drive You Crazy

Question: ‘How can something be a risk factor for a disease, when it isn’t even there?’ This is my new medical riddle for the 21st Century.

Or, try this question instead. What is a raised cholesterol level? You might think there is an answer to this question – but there is not.

Catch 22: ‘A problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem.’

I was contacted by a journalist recently about a piece that I had written for Redflagsdaily.  He was thinking of writing an article about ‘cholesterol’ and had picked up on my views, views that seemed to run contrary to everything else he was reading in the area.

A Massive Nail In The Coffin Of The Cholesterol, Or LDL, Hypothesis?

See Also: PROVE IT – PROVED WHAT?

New Study Data Has Researchers And “Rent-A-Quote” Doctors Pushing For More Intensive Cholesterol-Lowering Treatment. This Is Massive Hype.

For those who follow my ramblings, I felt the need for a very rapid follow-up to my column on the PROVE-IT study, which has been hailed as proof that the more you lower LDL levels the greater the protection against heart disease, and death.

New Study Data Has Researchers And “Rent-A-Quote” Doctors Pushing For More Intensive Cholesterol-Lowering Treatment. This Is Massive Hype.

‘The implications of this turning point – that is, of the new era of intensive statin therapy – are profound. Even today, only a fraction of the patients who should be treated with a statin are actually receiving such therapy…. More than 200 million people worldwide meet the criteria for treatment, but fewer than 25 million take statins.’

When someone sent me a copy of an article in the Washington Post, stating that more and more doctors now think that children as young as four should be put on statins, my fingers started to itch.

Here’s the offending headline:

 ‘Despite Controversy, Pressure Grows to Treat High Cholesterol in Children After Studies Link Elevated Levels to Adult Heart Disease.’
By Elizabeth Agnvall
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, December 2, 2003

I was idly watching a programme on the Atkins diet last night which, to my surprise, was reasonably balanced. Yes folks, the Atkins diet has crossed the pond to reach the United Kingdom. Although, in reality, all it is doing is returning. After all we invented it nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.

A man called Banting promoted a diet pretty much indistinguishable from that of Atkins in 1863. In fact, the verb to ‘bant’ is used in Sweden as a term for going on a diet

Synthetic ’Good’ Cholesterol Helps Clear Arteries

Small Study Indicates the Possibility That Drug Therapy Could Reverse Heart Disease. Rob Stein Nov 5^th 2003

‘A synthetic form of "good" cholesterol has been shown to quickly shrink blockages clogging coronary arteries, offering for the first time the possibility of a drug that could actually rapidly reverse heart disease, researchers reported yesterday….’

After reading a paper in the British Medical Journal which appeared a few days ago, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or stand at the edge of a cliff and scream. Instead I thought I would write a column, so that you may share my sense that the world has finally gone completely bonkers.

The paper was called:

‘Teleoanalysis — combining data from different types of study’

I am a great fan of the science philosopher Karl Popper, that is whenever I can manage to understand what it is that he is saying. I get through one paragraph at a time, very slowly, then I have to go and lie down until my brain stops hurting.

Popper has much to say on the theme of science, scientific progress and the like. He was highly pro-science and the proper use of the scientific method. But he was also acutely aware of the danger that science, and scientists, could become so entranced by a hypothesis that it became the answer, the truth, a belief. And those who dared to question such a fundamental belief were metaphorically burned at the stake.

I received an overwhelming response to my little primer on lipoproteins, so I thought I should explain a little more about fats. Excuse my diagrams, I got them all from the internet, so they have no overall design template, but I hope that I can keep things clear.

A fat has the basic structure shown below (Fig 1).

(Fig 1) My nameless fat

I have written a few columns on heart disease for Red Flags and the response has been very positive. However, there is a major problem that emerges quite clearly from e-mails that I get back. The problem is that there is an enormous level of confusion about the whole area of cholesterol, lipids, lipoproteins, fats etc. So I thought I should provide a simple primer on this area, as it makes debate and discussion a lot easier.

Women, Heart Disease And Sex Hormones

(Part Five) - (begin the series here)

Women don’t’ suffer as much CHD as men - of the same age - despite having slightly higher LDL levels. I’m talking here about women under the age of about seventy. After that the statistics become horribly inaccurate and, in the end, we all have to die of something.

Statins Do Not Prevent Heart Disease - At Least Not By Lowering LDL/Cholesterol Levels

(Part Four) - (begin the series here)

Statins reduce the risk of dying of coronary heart disease (CHD). There, I said it. You probably thought I didn’t believe this, but you can’t argue with the results from the clinical trials. Big, long, well-controlled studies that have all shown pretty much the same thing - stains provide protection against CHD.

A Raised LDL Level Has No Impact On Heart Disease

(Part Three) - (begin the series here)

Having previously demonstrated that neither cholesterol, nor saturated fat consumption, can have any impact on LDL levels. I now intend to make it clear that a raised LDL level has no impact on heart disease (CHD).

(PART TWO) - (begin the series here)

Some studies have shown that a high saturated fat intake raises cholesterol levels; others have shown the exact opposite. The longest, most prestigious and widely quoted long-term study on CHD, the Framingham study, clearly shows that those who eat the most saturated fat have the lowest cholesterol levels.

Find A Long-Term Study Showing That A High Cholesterol Or Saturated Fat Diet Has Any Impact On Blood Cholesterol Levels In A Normal Healthy Population - Or Any Effect Whatsoever On The Rate Of Death From Coronary Heart Disease

Cholesterol is a much maligned substance, the ‘cause’ of heart disease. If it is, it must have killed billions of people. Far more than the plague, every war ever fought, and all plane, train and car crashes ever - all added together, then multiplied by three.

INTRODUCTION TO THE CITIZEN’S PETITION ON STATINS

The medical profession has, after more than 30 years of excellent propaganda, successfully created the wholly iatrogenic - "pseudo-disease" dubbed "hypercholesterolemia" and the associated malady "cholesterol neurosis". After decades of dismal failure to cure this "disease" of numbers with low fat diets and a host of cholesterol lowering drugs, the medical profession stumbled upon the magic bullet, the cure for this dreaded artificial disease - statins (HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors). First released on the US market in 1987, statins have rapidly grown into one of the most widely prescribed class of drugs in history. Statins do three things: