Statins

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.