There have been a few news stories recently about statins
being prescribed to everyone over a certain age in the UK. The idea is that this will prevent strokes in
those at risk and a lot of figures have been bandied about as to how much this
will save in terms of hospitalisation of stroke victims balanced out by the
cost of giving these medicines out willy-nilly.
Obviously amongst the target population there will be many people who
would have lived happily without a stroke until old age or some other medical
condition took them. So a lot of people will
be given the medication needlessly.
This may not be a problem if it were not for the problem of side
effects. Statins have some pretty unpleasant
side effects, including muscle pains, through diabetes to kidney failure. The statistics on these are low admittedly,
but if you are one of the people who do suffer from one or more of the side
effects, then being given medication you don’t need which creates a problem you
did not have before is not very helpful and goes against the Hippocratic Oath. Being told you are one of a small minority
statistically does not help. Having
suffered debilitating side effects from other medication I for one would rather
not take statins unless I really have to.
But there is another side to this which I consider very serious. The Better Half (TBH) takes statins daily because
she has high levels of cholesterol if she doesn’t keep up with the
tablets. Often after taking this medication,
she suffers from side effects, getting muscle pain and headaches and a feeling
of woozyness . What is significant about
these side effects is that they only occur in any strength when she is taking
certain brands of the tablets provided for her.
Significantly, she does not get these symptoms noticeably from two particular
brands of allegedly identical tablets.
Now think about that.
Each brand is supposed to be manufactured to the same exacting standard
and should contain an identical dose of whatever ingredients used as any other
brand of the same type and dosage of medicine, but they don’t! They are different. The packets all give the same information,
the contents do not. That is plainly
wrong. Likewise they obviously are not
made up in the same way from the same ingredients, or they would all behave
exactly the same. If they are
prescribed and issued by the same pharmacist for the same purpose, no matter
who supplies them they should be identical and they are very obviously
not. The pharmacist knows this and is as
helpful as possible always trying to obtain the brand that has the least side
effects for TBH, but since they are a large company and their warehouse is in
another town, the local pharmacist has little control of what their company’s
buyers send him to re-stock his pharmacy.
I take regular daily medicine to control a hiatus hernia and
found that a certain make would last 24 hours, whilst another make only lasted
twelve or so.
This is an important problem. If medicines prescribed to us by our doctors
are not consistent, how many other side effects are we suffering from because
there is something different in each brand of pills we are given? If you are feeling under the weather, have
unexplained symptoms or feel that sometimes the pills you take are not working for
some inexplicable reason, the next time it happens, look at the brand of your
pills. Maybe you are not ill, just being
given something that is sub-standard.
So the question remains, are we being screwed over by the
pill manufacturers? What has happened to
both me and my wife seem to bear that out and I think our MPs should get
involved. Check your medication; you may
be getting screwed over by the pharmaceuticals too.
