The Anomaly

405 lbs x 20 reps! Turning 60 in 2 months! And for the haters, no TRT and lifetime no steroids!

Ok, Mr Snyder, I’ve reviewed your labs and everything looks great, except for one thing “All right, what is the one thing?” Well, looks like your LDL cholesterol is just a tad bit high and so I’m going to recommend you go on a statin “A statin? How long am I supposed to take that for” You’ll need to be on it for the rest of your life “The rest of my life, I’m only 38 and you just said everything looks great and that I’m healthy” Yes, that’s true but I’d rather be safe than sorry “What about side effects, I’ve heard that people can have muscle issues and some get dementia?” Most side effects are very mild and very rare “Didn’t a brand new huge study just show that people on statins have more than double the risk of becoming demented” Well, yes I saw that study, and most of the people prescribed statins were more sick than the ones that weren’t “Didn’t the authors correct for those confounders and identify a potential problem with CoQ10 depletion” Well, also yes but they say that maybe there was some “residual confounding” that they didn’t account for “Is residual confounding likely to be enough to more than double the hazard ratio for dementia?” I see your point but we have several large randomized controlled trials on statins that don’t show increased rates of dementia “Weren’t those studies paid for by the manufacturers of statins and didn’t they make like a billion dollars off these drugs” More like a trillion dollars, but we have to trust these studies as it is the best data we have, also there are a couple that were funded publicly as well “You mean via the NIH? Doesn’t the NIH also receive lots of money from drug companies through public/private entities and also pay researchers royalties for intellectual property” Well, yes I suppose that is true as well, but we have regulatory agencies that protect us from corrupts science “You mean the FDA? Isn’t true that the FDA receives the majority of its funding for drug approvals from the pharmaceutical industry itself? Kind of like the fox guarding the hen house. I think they call that corporate capture or something like that.” Ok yes, I can see where the opportunity to fudge numbers a bit could be lucrative, but we have excellent peer review by the top medical journals in the world and they certainly wouldn’t put up with shady science “Are you talking like the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The British Medical Journal?” Yes, those are the one’s, very prestigious “Didn’t editors of all those journals basically admit that they could no longer trust the science in the journals and that they’d basically just became marketing propaganda for the pharmaceutical companies?” Well, yes I do remember hearing something about that at one point, but it was probably just sour grapes or something like that. Besides our medical organizations like the American Heart Association put out guidelines for this stuff “Don’t organizations like the AHA also take millions of dollars from these drug companies? Is it possible that that money could influence their guidelines?” Well yes that’s also true, but that’s just the way it is. “Isn’t it also true that doctors are often given large bonuses if a certain percentage of their patients are on statins?” Well yes Medicare and other commercial entities will often pay decent sized bonuses for prescribing patterns that match the guidelines “Aren’t Medicare policies subject to legislative input and is it true that Pharma heavily lobbies congress” Well , yes Pharma is by far the biggest federal lobbying entity in the US and there are something like 3 lobbyist for every single member of congress, but I’m sure it has very little effect on policy “Doc you seem a little gullible if you ask me!” Hey, I have $400,000 in loans I gotta pay back, cut me some slack “Doc, I’m gonna hold of on the statins for now, maybe I’ll wait a bit until they clean up all the corruption first” I get it, I don’t blame you!

How are you showing up?