There’s a lot of controversy this week about statins because NICE (the body which makes recommendations for the NHS in England) seems about to recommend a huge increase in the number of people taking statins. A group of senior medics have written to the government criticising this recommendation. The letter,
signed by nine doctors and academics including the president of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), warns “public and professional faith” in the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) could be lost and harm could be done to “many patients over many years”. It accuses the standards body of seeking to “medicalise five million healthy individuals”.
Their criticism includes concern about the quality of the evidence being used by NICE. They say they are….
seriously concerned that eight members of NICE’s panel of 12 experts for its latest guidance have direct financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture statins”. They also warn that “overdependence on industry data raises concerns about possible biases”
But whatever you think about the quality of the evidence, do you think it really makes good sense to medicate millions of healthy people? This excellent summary from John Middleton really struck home for me
The Nice proposals suggest putting five million extra people on statins to prevent fewer than 500 deaths a year. For every death postponed, 10,000 people will have to take a statin to no purpose.
Let me just be clear that I understand the potential benefit statins can bring to people who have heart disease, and avoiding strokes and heart attacks is a perfectly reasonable goal. What bothers me is the idea that the way to ensure a healthy life for already healthy people is to get masses of them to take drugs for life. That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Surely, if we want to stack the odds in favour of healthy lives in already healthy people, we need to be making the changes to our society which will ensure healthier ways of living, not prescribing more drugs to more people for more of their lives.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Reblogged this on Lorraine Cleaver.
I can reflect on this advice from memory Bob, many years ago. It simply whistled past in the wind of the noise of brands and advertisements, media and how one’s life had been lived to then. Even when enlightenment and awakening was recognised there remained the connection to the system through the human body- the concept of the human body as a battery fueling a ‘system’, Matrix like, is coming more to the fore. Marx pointed aspects of this out of course, but technology as an absorbing force different to human being has been written about for over a thousand years. Would love to see a wee blog from you about the recent media attention on the Turing test and how artificial intelligence relates to human being.
[…] think there are many problems with what is known as “Evidence Based Medicine” (not least being the influence of vested interests such as Pharmaceutical companies on the production of “evidence”), and there is an […]