New Statin Drug Guidelines

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

In the last few weeks the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) have released new guidelines for who should be taking statin drugs. Their stated goal of this release is to address the surging rates of heart attacks and strokes. The real reason is that these two organizations are just pawns for the big pharmaceutical companies. They themselves admit that by using these new guidelines the number of people taking statin drugs will double. Currently there are about 35 million users and they expect another 35 million users will be added.

The way they do this is by broadening the definition of who is “at-risk.” The new rules include healthy people that do not currently have any markers for heart disease. They explain the thought is that these people could develop heart problems later in life, so including them in new recommendations now may help lower that risk.

Antibiotic Overuse

Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.

In today’s world of medicine the use of antibiotics is as common as drinking water. Every cough, sniffle and earache elicits an antibiotic prescription from the doctor. If that isn’t enough, veterinarians treating animals are much the same. The meat you buy at the grocery is commonly loaded with antibiotics, given solely to keep the flock of hundreds and thousands of chickens well enough to kill them faster.  This abuse of antibiotics is causing irreparable harm.

There are many scientists sounding the warning that we are at the end of the age of antibiotics. More and more bugs are becoming resistant to the drugs we have been overusing, and drug companies are not searching for more. Drug companies are interested only in selling lots of people expensive drugs. Heart drugs, cancer drugs and psychotic drugs garner $10,000 to $80,000 per patient per year. Antibiotics only register in at a few hundred dollars per patient.

The threat of having no antibiotics available is very real! According to a report titled “Antibiotic Resistance Threat Report” published by the CDC this year, 2 million adults and children become infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria each year, and at least 23,000 of them die as a direct result of those infections. Even more die from complications. The death toll is just a best guess, and the real numbers are likely much higher.