Andreas Moritz
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 I suggest that you read the following warning statement, issued on the official lipitor website:
"LIPITOR?(atorvastatin calcium) is a prescription drug used with diet to lower cholesterol. lipitor?is not for everyone, including those with liver disease or possible liver problems, and women who are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant. lipitor?has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attack. If you take lipitor? tell your doctor about any unusual muscle pain or weakness. This could be a sign of serious side effects. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 But lipitor is only approved by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce the risk of heart attack if you have multiple risk factors for heart disease, and its benefits are based largely on its supposed ability to lower cholesterol, which may or may not have anything to do with preventing cardiovascular events and death. In fact, if you read the small print on television ads for lipitor a couple of years ago, you'd briefly see the following words flash on the screen in tiny letters: "Lipitor has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attacks. |
Andreas Moritz
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| LIPITOR?is not for everyone, including those with liver disease or possible liver problems, and women who are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant. lipitor?has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attack. If you take lipitor? tell your doctor about any unusual muscle pain or weakness. This could be a sign of serious side effects. It is important to tell your doctor about any medications you are currently taking to avoid possible serious drug interactions... |
Hyla Cass
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 Why would lipitor make my muscles hurt?"
"Because it interferes with the production of coenzyme Qio-"
I was met with a blank look. Predictably, he had no idea what coenzyme Q10 (CoQj0) was. I explained that it's a nutrient required by every cell of the body to transform carbohydrate and fat into energy, in the many "energy-producing factories" called mitochondria; and that the same mechanism lipitor employs to lower cholesterol also lowers production of CoQ10. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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| In fact, if you read the small print on television ads for lipitor a couple of years ago, you'd briefly see the following words flash on the screen in tiny letters: "Lipitor has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attacks."
Another example: As of 2004, Fosamax (for osteoporosis) was the third most frequently prescribed drugs for seniors. As my friend John Abramson, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard and author of the superb book, Overdosed America, writes, "One wonders how many of the women taking this drug actually benefit, since ... |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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| Why would lipitor make my muscles hurt?"
"Because it interferes with the production of coenzyme Qjo"
I was met with a blank look. Predictably, he had no idea what coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) was. I explained that it's a nutrient required by every cell of the body to transform carbohydrate and fat into energy, in the many "energy-producing factories" called mitochondria; and that the same mechanism lipitor employs to lower cholesterol also lowers production of CoQ10. |
Andreas Moritz
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| LIPITOR?has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attack. If you take lipitor? tell your doctor about any unusual muscle pain or weakness. This could be a sign of serious side effects. It is important to tell your doctor about any medications you are currently taking to avoid possible serious drug interactions..."
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled "Cholesterol and Mortality," after age 50 there is no increased overall death rate associated with high cholesterol. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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| Magazine ads for lipitor leave you with the impression that if your cholesterol is even slightly elevated, taking the popular drug will save your life. But lipitor is only approved by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce the risk of heart attack if you have multiple risk factors for heart disease, and its benefits are based largely on its supposed ability to lower cholesterol, which may or may not have anything to do with preventing cardiovascular events and death. |
| In fact, if you read the small print on television ads for lipitor a couple of years ago, you'd briefly see the following words flash on the screen in tiny letters: "Lipitor has not been shown to prevent heart disease or heart attacks."
Another example: As of 2004, Fosamax (for osteoporosis) was the third most frequently prescribed drugs for seniors. As my friend John Abramson, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard and author of the superb book, Overdosed America, writes, "One wonders how many of the women taking this drug actually benefit, since ... |
| The beauty of taking niacin is that it's even complementary when used in conjunction with statin drugs, like lipitor. A study in the 2002 American Heart Journal showed that a relatively small amount of niacin added to a statin drug regimen led to significant improvements in HDL cholesterol. (Remember, statin drugs are usually good at reducing the "bad" LDL cholesterol but do not have a significant impact on raising the "good" HDL cholesterol. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Nexium, Prevacid, lipitor, aspirin, Celebrex, Crestor and other such drugs have become household words. Neighbors, friends and relatives are all taking at least one pill, and more often, several pills, each day for months and even years. Television, radio and print media are full of praise for their "life enhancing" benefits. Newspapers go even one step further. Not a day passes without an article or two heralding the latest study "demonstrating" the supposed benefits of the wonder drugs. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Of course, the ads glossed over the possibility that lipitor itself might kill them. Then there are the so-called feel-good ads, which aren't intended to make patients feel better, but rather to encourage drug company employees, stockholders, and legislators to feel good about the beneficial work a company is doing. Merck's tagline for recent radio ads was "Merck, where patients come first," a theme the company undoubtedly wanted to emphasize in the face of hundreds of lawsuits from patients who suffered heart attacks from its painkiller Vioxx. |
Andreas Moritz
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| Before you decide to take lipitor or other statins, consider these basic points:
• You need to tell your doctor and pharmacist if you are allergic to any other drugs. This obviously raises the question of the number ofpatients who follow that advice. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 Michelle Petri, who is involved in a trial to treat lupus patients prophylactically with lipitor, a potent anticholesterol drug thought to lower the risk of heart attack, says that "the risk is fifty times greater of having a heart attack if you have lupus."
The concern here extends beyond the autoimmune patients who may develop heart disease. It encompasses those with atherosclerosis who do not know that autoimmunity is involved in their disease and who may be unaware that they are more susceptible to other autoimmune diseases as well. |
Charles Barber
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 A plant in Barceloneta makes Zoloft and Viagra, and another in Vega Baja makes lipitor and Neurontin.)82
I loved the scientific poetry of some of the names of the drugs, and when I came across a really terrible new name, like a new antipsychotic called Abilify, I resolved that I could do better, and my next career should be as a namer of drugs. Some of the drugs cost $5 for a month's supply, and others $250. Most of my clients were taking three, four, five, six different types of drugs, typically at a cost of $200 to $300 a month.
And my first experience with Millie was in many ways typical. |
| Detorre, the president of the Institute (which came up with the names for lipitor, Clarinex, and Allegra), "the harder the tonality of the name the more efficacious the product in the mind of the physician and the end user."114 The cost of developing a trade name for a drug is an estimated $500,000 to $2.5 million.115 Names are registered even before the drug exists. There are "only so many Z's and X's to go around," Professor Trombetta notes. |
| In addressing lifestyle issues rather than actual diseases, Prozac vastly expanded its market base and paved the way for a succession of lifestyle-enhancing medications— Viagra, most notably; lipitor and other cholesterol medications; a series of other psychiatric drugs—which have overwhelmingly driven Big Pharma's profits over the last decade.
It worked beyond anybody's expectations. Sales of Prozac hit $2 billion in 1998.4 In 2002, more than 11 percent of American women and 5 percent of American men were taking antidepressants, which amounts to about 25 million people. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| A new antibiotic might save lives, but a new lifestyle drug—Prozac for depression, Clar-itin for allergies, or a drug like lipitor that treats a risk factor like high cholesterol—could be taken every day by huge populations, sometimes for years on end. Companies stepped up their marketing not only to consumers but also to doctors, and sales reps found themselves in a gift-giving arms race, trying to outdo one another in an effort to get doctors to write more and more prescriptions. |
| First there was Mevacor, then Prevachol, Zochor, and lipitor. We have seven different versions of SSRIs, along with multiple me-too pills for erectile dysfunction and allergies. But there's a catch to this strategy: In order for a manufacturer to boost a second, not to mention a third, fourth, or fifth, me-too drug into blockbuster status, it has to sell the living daylights out of its drug. There are only three ways to do this: capture market share, increase the total market for the class, or create an entirely new market. |
| For instance, the criteria for who needs to be on a statin, or cholesterol-lowering drug, were redefined in 2001, more than doubling the number of Americans who could be put on drugs like lipitor and Zo-cor from about thirteen million to thirty-six million. Many experts argue that these new guidelines are based on a faulty interpretation of the medical evidence and could actually prove harmful to many people who wind up taking the drugs. Critics also note that eight of the nine authors who crafted the revised guidelines were being paid by the companies that make statins. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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| And you don't get heart disease because you don't have enough lipitor in your diet.
Conspiracy? No, but...
A spate of "natural cure" books have looked at some of the marketing practices of the drug companies, the power of the food companies and Big Pharma, and the porous influence of these huge conglomerates on agricultural policy and on the FDA, and these books and authors have concluded that it's all a great big government conspiracy to keep you from knowing what you need to get yourself well and to stay healthy and out of the medical system. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 In 2005, the two top-selling drugs on Forbes magazine's list of pharmaceutical juggernauts were lipitor and Zocor, both cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. Together, they did a combined business of more than $13 billion. It's worth noting that many researchers believe that the good that statin drugs accomplish has much less to do with their ability to lower cholesterol than their ability to lower inflammation, which is indeed a definite risk for heart disease, as well as a component of Alzheimer's, obesity, and diabetes. |
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
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 Begin with one of the morning shows, Good Morning America, and Pfizer's lipitor. A female announcer says: "For millions of adults with high cholesterol, diet and exercise aren't always enough. But adding lipitor can help lower your total cholesterol 29 percent to 45 percent. ... So take the next step—ask your doctor if lipitor is right for you."
On the afternoon soaps, Novartis Pharmaceuticals pushes its Zel-norm for irritable bowel syndrome with constipation. On the evening news at CBS, it's Merck's Fosamax for osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Example: An average daily dose of the popular cholesterol-lowering statin lipitor costs approximately $98 per month. Lovastatin, a generic of the statin Mevacor that is used in lower-risk patients, is available for $37 a month.
The next time your doctor writes you a prescription, be sure to ask the right questions to save money, advises Diane Nitzki-George, RPh, a clinical pharmacist in Evanston, Illinois, and the author of Generic Alternatives to Prescription Drugs (Basic Health)...
•Is a generic available? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Preliminary data have shown lipid-regulating compounds, such as lipitor or Zocor, are causing fish to deposit fat into their eggs which might affect reproduction.
"Pharmaceuticals are designed for a very specific mode of action," lead scientist Rebecca Klaper stated. Klaper said some of the male minnows are "missing a few steps" as they prepare for mating.
Researchers are calling the pollutants "emerging contaminants." The term encompasses personal care products, prescription drugs, pesticides, and other substances, some of which are known to affect human hormone production. |
Bottom Line Health
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| THE STUDY
In their study, Cannon and his team collected data on 1,825 patients who had experienced a heart attack or unstable angina and were taking 80 mg of lipitor daily.
We can feel comfortable using high-dose statins even if LDL cholesterol ends up at 40 mg/dL. That's actually a good thing.
Christopher P. Cannon, MD
After four months of therapy, LDL cholesterol dropped below 100 mg/dL for 91% of the patients. Of these, 11% saw their LDL cholesterol drop below 40 mg/dL, according to the report. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 The FDA issued four letters to Pfizer for violations related to unfounded lipitor claims including the assertion that lipitor could reduce heart disease and was safer than competitors' rival drugs. But, as a GAO investigation reported, "Many television DTC advertisements are on the air for only a short time—about one-fifth of them for one month, about one-third for two months or less."29 Yet, the FDA's warnings would take up to 78 days to issue—long after the ads may have stopped being shown anyway. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
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| In fact, lipitor (generic name atorvastatin) is the top-selling drug on the planet, a $20 billion industry. They've been heralded as "miracle drugs" that reduce cholesterol counts and battle inflammation. Less frequently used drugs for high cholesterol include the bile acid sequestrants and fibrates.
DRUGS FOR HEART DISEASE RISK FACTORS AND THE NUTRIENTS THEY DEPLETE attack. |
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