Chronic High Cholesterol medication

Life Health & Fitness
1

I recently got a blood report done and it turns out my cholesterol levels are a tad high: 850 vs 200 (normal).

Does anyone have any experience getting cholesterol meds from their local clinic? Everyone knows that doctors at clinics usually only prescribe 3 days worth of meds even if you have an illness lasting much longer.

Has anyone ever gotten a month’s worth of meds at their local clinic? It’s not the price that bothers me so much, but the inconvenience of returning to the clinic every few days to get chronic illness medication.j

I would truly appreciate any insights or potential solutions anyone may have.

GOOD HEALTH AND A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR!

2

I get cholesterol and hypertension meds from the Adventist hospital. The cholesterol meds are very expensive, but I pay around NT$300 for three months’ worth. That is on NHI. You have to have a blood test every three months, though. :2cents:

3

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated! :thumbsup:

4

If you don’t want the rigmarole of going to a hospital, you can get the meds OTC at any decent pharmacy. Rosuvastatin and Pitavastatin are around NT$1200 for a box of 28.

5

“High cholesterol medication” (aka statins) is a huge waste of money and may have horrible/irreversible side effects.

High total cholesterol is no longer considered a risk marker for anything. Statins do lower cholesterol (a lot), but they have little measurable effect on heart disease risk and zero effect on all-cause mortality. The only demonstrated benefit (and even then a very small one) is specifically for men, middle-aged, who have actually had some kind of acute cardiac event. The side effects are a direct result of interfering with the body’s cholesterol homeostatis loop. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Plenty of research papers available for free on the internet, mostly not written by conspiracy theorists.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/841904
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60367-5/abstract

If you have any genuine risk markers for heart disease - such as obesity or ‘prediabetes’ - the usual culprit is poor diet and lack of exercise. Just fixing those issues will improve your health more reliably than statins.

6

Research is always in motion… but there is anecdotal evidence in the bodybuilding world that scares the shit out of me–all the pros who ate eggs yolks daily without exception developed heart problems by the time they hit 50. Essentially without exception. Those who ate just the egg white did not.

Maybe its ok to spend half the year with high total chol, whereas we used to think it was highly problematic, but it might also be true that to spend a majority of the time that way is still deadly.

7

It’s true that research is always ongoing, but in the case of cholesterol it’s been ongoing for 50 years. One by one various assertions about it have been tested and shown to be empirically false (and logically inconsistent with known biochemistry). Check the links. These are not tinfoil-hat publications.

Most of the cholesterol circulating in your blood is manufactured by your own body. It’s a precursor for various hormones and a substrate for all sorts of critical cellular machinery. If it’s “high”, it’s because your body has decided - for its own inscrutable reasons - that it needs to be high. LDL (which is hard to measure accurately anyway) has a crude correlation with heart disease risk, but there is no known theoretical mechanism by which high total cholesterol might cause disease; therefore fiddling with this synthesis pathway seems like a dumb idea. The general consensus today is that metabolic syndrome (of which heart disease is one symptom) is caused mostly by smoking, inactivity, stress, and processed foods like soft drinks, white bread and polished rice. Since these things are all under the control of the individual concerned, the only reason for prescribing drugs to offset them would be the profit involved in convincing someone he has a lifelong ‘disease’ that needs to be ‘managed’. ka-ching!

As for the bodybuilder anecdotes, I’d be more interested in concrete data on the subject.

8

Research is always in motion… but there is anecdotal evidence in the bodybuilding world that scares the shit out of me–all the pros who ate eggs yolks daily without exception developed heart problems by the time they hit 50. Essentially without exception. Those who ate just the egg white did not.

Maybe its ok to spend half the year with high total chol, whereas we used to think it was highly problematic, but it might also be true that to spend a majority of the time that way is still deadly.[/quote]

There is a reasonable explanation as to why the egg yolk-eating body builders may have got heart issues compared to the group avoiding yolks, although your observation, as finley had said, is merely anecdotal at this point rather than solid data.

Cholesterol usually becomes only an issue if it is being oxidized where it then can add to the athersclerotic process. Egg yolks are high in fats and cholesterol and eating lots of them, in combination with heavy exercise, and eating a low antioxidant diet can potentially promote the oxidation of this dietary cholesterol and lipids. However, if you eat more cholesterol the body automatically will produce less on its own. You’d have to eat in the neighborhood of 20 or 30 egg yolks a day to probably activate detrimental effects.

finley is right that the matter with cholesterol has been going on for decades. Your notion that “Research is always in motion” seems to imply that it’s a honest rather straight-forward process. If you look at how organized medicine and medical research works you’d know that the majority of medical research is not in a constant search for truth but for whatever dogma and ideology makes them a ton of money WITHIN corporate business which is mostly a disease-management, thus lucrative, model. This history of cholesterol of the last 60 years clearly shows that.

One of the dogmas that was favorable to generating huge profits for the medical business was that cholesterol causes heart disease, out of which the business cartel created cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins.

The most reliable evidence has long tied statin use with memory problems, muscle disorders, liver damage, cataracts, nerve damage, pancreatitis, erectile dysfunction, brain dysfunction, diabetes, and with an increased risk of cancer and higher mortality (statins only somewhat reduce the risk of non-fatal heart attacks).

The physiological mechanisms of how statins do serious damage are also well understood, such as by their impairment of oxidative cell metabolism, the increase in inflammation and cell destruction, the lowering of cholesterol and steroid hormone production, the promotion of pancreatic injury, etc. - rather thoroughly explained in this scholarly well referenced article on how statins, and a cholesterol-lowering popular diet pill advertised by Dr. Oz, promote diabetes at http://www.supplements-and-health.com/garcinia-cambogia-side-effects.html - look at Figure 7 to see how irrational it is to block the production of cholesterol!

Yet despite of the existence of that scientific knowledge, the medical business and the public health authorities keep ignoring it and continue to recommend statins to diabetics and make claims that they have a low risk profile despite that they are also significantly linked to cancer and higher mortality (just look at the propaganda put out by the Mayo clinic on statin drugs: “the risk of life-threatening side effects from statins is very low”).

And because of such medical propaganda, few people are aware that the medical claims of benefits of statins are mostly based on junk studies conducted by people with vested interests. And, logically, it’s mostly the corporate medical business and other people with similar vested interests tied to it (eg, mouthpieces, hacks) who promote the alleged value of these highly lucrative products.

Also, older people with HIGH cholesterol live longer than those with low cholesterol levels (see above mentioned article for numerous scientific study references confirming this).

Because the cholesterol-heart disease theory, or rather medical dogma, is wrong, the use of statins is also wrong by logical extension.

So the real truth is that statins have almost no real benefit in the very vast majority of users. They do more harm than good (read Uffe Ravnskov’s “The Cholesterol Myths” and Malcolm Kendrick’s “The Great Cholesterol Con”). It’s one of many “scientific” scams of the mainstream medical business.

9

Statins are apparently the most profitable drug in history. I was trying to stick to empirical facts about their efficacy, but that simple fact must be clouding a few people’s judgements. No drug company wants to hear that getting people to quit smoking and eat less junk food is more effective than funding statins.

It’s only a pop-science article, but it’s a good (if rather simplistic) summary of the logical problems behind prescribing statins:

scientificamerican.com/artic … conundrum/

It seems pretty obvious to me that, if you have a hypothesis that high LDL is the proximate cause of heart disease, but reducing LDL (which can be done very reliably with statins) has no effect on heart disease, then the hypothesis is wrong. I find it amusing that people refer to this as a ‘conundrum’. It really isn’t.

10

A good example of “always in motion”. I don’t disagree with anything you said but if you read the anecdotal evidence as literally as I intended it, to eat high chol for the majority of the year feels like slow-suicide.

Someone like me just can’t ignore it, there’s no way it’s just too blatant

11

Perhaps im way off base here, but this sentence tells me if you are a major consumer of high cholesterol foods and junk foods, you are better off being a couch potato because combining it with exercise will cause the cholesterol’s oxidation?

I was reading on a bodybuilding forum recently that a study of bodybuilders who consumed the egg yolks along with the egg whites almost all had damaging heart disease in their 50’s compared with those who just ate the egg whites.