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Everyone over 50 should take statins to lower their cholesterol, an editorial argued last week in The Lancet. The piece based its recommendation on a meta-analysis of 27 clinical trials published in the same issue that concluded statins significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events in healthy people without posing substantial risks. Subsequent articles heralding the meta-analysis's findings were published in the Guardian, Forbes and the U.K. Telegraph. But based on the numbers, many experts still aren't convinced that the drugs' benefits outweigh their risks.
There's no question that statins save lives when they are prescribed to people with cardiovascular disease. But whether the drugs should also be given to healthy people who do not have high cholesterol or other cardiovascular risk factors has been a long-standing and controversial question. One large clinical trial known as JUPITER reported in 2008 that rosuvastatin (Crestor) lowers the risk of heart attacks and other events by 44 percent in healthy subjects but experts have since raised questions about its methodology in part because the trial was stopped early, which might have created the effect of overestimating the drug's benefits. The current meta-analysis was designed to help put the issue to rest. "Our aim was to bring together all the available evidence," explains co-author Colin Baigent, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in England.
After pooling the results of 27 trials involving 165,149 people, the meta-analysis reported that people are 21 percent less likely to suffer a serious vascular event such as a heart attack, stroke or bypass surgery after their cholesterol drops by the amount that might be expected after taking statins for a year than are similar people who do not take the pills. But such outcomes are rare in healthy individuals anyway, so the risk reduction actually translated to a small clinical benefit—reducing the overall risk from 4.04 percent to 3.27 percent per year, a difference of 0.77 percent.
In other words, approximately 130 people need to take statins for a year to prevent just one unwanted health outcome, and 500 people have to take them to prevent a single death. "Once you get down to very low levels of risk, the benefits are very small," Baigent admits.
Experts also raise questions about the subjects included in the meta-analysis. Although the review was supposedly designed to assess the effects of statins in people at low risk of vascular disease, 60 percent of its participants in fact already had vascular disease. "Why combine people who have heart disease with people who don't? It's really misleading," says Kausik Ray, a cardiologist at Saint George's University of London. In 2010 Ray and his colleagues published a meta-analysis of 11 statin clinical trials involving 65,229 subjects without cardiovascular disease and concluded that statins do not reduce the risk of death in healthy people. (By including people who had vascular disease, the Lancet meta-analysis overestimated statins' benefits: a subgroup analysis reveals that among people who did not have vascular disease, statins only reduced the absolute risk of a cardiovascular event by 0.4 percent per year.)
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Add CommentAfter reading the potential side effects, no matter how rare they say they are, there is no way I would ever take a statin; I will take my chance with the heart attack. A medicine with those kind of side effects, and that many side effects, is not a medicine but a bullet designed to keep you in the doctors office and pouring your hard earned money into their pockets. Statins are a health risk, not a health benefit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOats, can lower your cholesterol by 50 points in six months, and there is no side effect, and the oats cost you about $0.10 cents a bowl, and they taste really good if you load them up with your favorite fruit. Hawthorn strengthens your heart, and it costs about $8.00 for 100 capsules, and helps you survive a heart attack when you have one, and it has no side effect. I do not know why a doctor would tell their patient to take a dangerous drug knowing that it could possibly kill the patient and ending the doctor's career.
Recent article stated that people with Alsheimers disease have low levels of cholesterol in their brains and memory loss was mentioned as one adverse effect of statins. I think it would be interesting to know what is the correlation between statin use and memory problems in those users? Brains are made of cholesterol, so I think this connection should be explored. But very often currently your doctor is looking into one area of your health only, overlooking the problems his 'solution' might cause at other areas of ones health. Maybe the chinese system would be better: Pay your doctor to keep you healthy and don't pay if you are sick.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNonsense! Why take drugs when you don't absolutely have to? My GP warned me that my cholesterol was too high and did write out a prescription for statins. However, I simply changed my diet: less meat, much more fish and vegetables and lo and behold! When I had a checkup about 6 months later, my cholesterollevel had plummeted. So you see, a proper change in diet and a bit of discipline will go a long way. My philosophy has always been that unless your heart and bloodvessels were about to explode because your cholesterol was clogging up everything, you shouldn't use statins. It simply isn't necessary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have the opposite problem. My "good" cholesterol is too low while my "bad" cholesterol is in the normal range. My wife, trying to take good care of me restricted cholesterol in my diet until my "good" cholesterol went to it's lowest level. I then ended up in the hospital getting a stent put into my main artery of the heat due to a 95% blockage. My cholesterol was at 100. It turns out that the lack of good cholesteral allowed the normal levels of bad cholesterol to built up the plaque that almost killed me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo prescribe cholesterol reducing medications across the board without analysis first would have the same result for many people. It could kill them. I was lucky in that I went in for a catherization study to find out what was causing my symptoms and they found the problem in time. Others may not be so lucky. Now my cardiologist prescribes me to eat lots of shellfish, shrimp, lobster, eggs, etc as well as drinking a glass of wine every day to get my good cholesterol up. My cholesterol levels are much better now. And my wife has learned not to listen to every health fad that she reads in the magazines or hears on the talk shows.
If you have concerns about your health, find a good responsible doctor and have some basic tests done to see if you need help or not. Try changing your diet and lifestyle instead of popping the latest miracle cure.
Just my 2 cents....
To someone selling pills, the whole world looks like a mouth...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI say eat less of EVERYTHING and exercise more. A LOT more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut that's not very popular because 1) people are LAZY, want to get everything by taking a pill (and the pill pushers are very willing to promise whatever you want to hear), 2) NO ONE makes any money from eating less and exercising more, except maybe the shoe salesman and the gym.
Not what you wanted to hear, huh??
I think that the approach that "50 year olds suffer from a Statin deficiency" is a good place to start questioning the practice. ALL effort is put into treating the symptom, not the cause. The fact that MANY heart attack patients are admitt...ed with cholesterol levels that are not in the "risk factor" zone makes one question whether or not cholesterol is the underlying CAUSE of heart attacks. Scientists and Doctors alike seem to ignore that fact. When it's presented to them, their answer is to "lower the safe cholesterol limits" and drug more people, instead of questioning the correlation (or lack thereof) in itself. I think Statins require a LOT more scrutiny than they're getting. That they're "known to save lives" needs to be quested, just like it's "known that saturated fat is bad." Everyone references these facts, but they're actually very hard to even CORRELATE, much less PROVE, when you start looking at hard evidence... We need more science and less politics... This isn't a health issue, it's a political issue that's jeapordizing health.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt really all comes down to what you put into your body. People are so concerned about drugs and chemicals, yet they forget that FOOD is MADE from "chemicals." Everything you put into your body affects you in some way.... so why not address that before resorting to drugs? It's not hard, it's just that no one makes proficts by putting an advertisement on TV that says "Eat less processed garbage and more food your body can USE."
Lowering cholesterol is dangerous... Your body NEEDS it. Infant breastmilk is full of it. It's the precursor to your HORMONES (which regulate weight and basically EVERY activity in your body), it builds the myelin sheath (you know, to protect your neurons and make them more efficient) and people are saying Cholesterol is bad. It's OBVIOUSLY not the whole picture. What gives??
After my 'bad' cholestrol got to the moderate risk level, and I had other health warnings, the doc put me on statins. We 'negotiated' half the strength he wanted, and it's kept things below the warning line. Any associated memory loss is impossible to separate from the general reduced focus of the lifestyle. The only noticeable side-effect is some occasional dizziness leaning down or squatting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe best guideline is to trust your doctor's recommendation. It's better than guessing your way through the risk/reward minefield.
From here, the main reason to delay usage is the long-term need to increase the dosage.
I think the correlation between everyone taking statins and the pharmaceutical companies making huge profits needs to be taken into consideration in order to get a full view of the picture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that taking Statins to lower your cholesterol without any evidence of plaque buildup inside your arteries is a bad approach to healthcare relying on medication instead of healthy habits to improve your health. Not all cholesterol is atherogenic that’s why non invasive imaging methods that can prove the presence or absence of atherosclerotic plaque are needed. There’s plenty of evidence that Calcium Score can play this role and I see a lot of forces against this ways.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wouldn't even take statins WITH plaque buildup. There's no proof that cholesterol plays any role in the build up; in fact, newer research is showing it to be inflammation, which can definitely be (and often is) caused by overabundant PUFA's... you know. Canola oil, soy oil, peanut oil, veggie oil... "heart healthy" stuff (among other foods and conditions).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, cholesterol IS an ingredient in the plaque... but the plaque is made up of many other things, so it is wrong to assume that the cholesterol is what's CAUSING the plaque. It's like saying airbags cause accidents because they're there at the scene of the crime. A lot of wrecked cars have inflated airbags; therefore, airbags must cause these accidents. Easy. Done. No more questions.
One can quote WebMD and several other sites that say "it's known that cholesterol causes plaque" but when one reads the references, they're either outdated, proven to be wrong, or often the site HAS no references; this fact is just "known" to be true. It's bad science, and there's NO excuse.
A lot of these beliefs stem from the idea that cholesterol, when at room temperature, is "hard," therefore it will clog arteries. One can show this by pouring it down a pvc pipe. Well, this logic falls apart when one points out that the body is not at room temperature (if it is, we've got problems!). It also falls apart when one points out that arteries are very much NOT LIKE pvc pipes. That's just the start.
We're clinging to the belief that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad like we once clung to the belief that the world was flat. We can't let it go, because it's "known to be true," despite the mass of contradicting information, thanks to science.
It's very frustrating... and expensive. And we have to watch loved ones die because we cannot accept that our fundamental beliefs may be wrong.
Within the past 5 years, an editorial in a major medical journal noted that while satins may prevent certain cardiovascular events, there has been no evidence that the pharmaceutical gold standard is attained - does it make you live longer. The assumption is that preventing cholesterol buildup and its sequellae, will - ipso facto - mean a longer life. But that is only an assumption that does not hold up. Among other side-effects, statins are known to be potent mitochondria toxins. Sick mitochondria leads to faster aging. So fewer coronaries are offset by more rapid aging = no average increased life span.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNote that blocking cholesterol synthesis means a lot of other things are blocked also because building-block squalene is diminished, and CoQ is diminished, and likewise a number of the steroid hormones are also diminished. None of these other effects are good. Low CoQ hits mitochondria hard as they use it in the electron transport path from which our cells derive ATP energy. With loss of energy, tiredness and leg cramps are common symptoms. Of course adding CoQ to the diet helps - but not with the vast array of steroid hormones our body needs. Lesson: Don't lose sight of the "gold standard" - something else may be lurking unseen in the background.
100% correct
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy own experience after doctor doubled statin dose for my already low cholesterol was waking up one morning with both hands partially paralysed hands and other neuro symptoms over the next few days. Internist and neurologist absolutely refused to consider the possibility this never diagnosed condition might be related to statins. Don't trust your doctor on this. I dropped statins and slowly recovered over the next two years. It may have been something else, but when doctors refuse to consider side effects of a new medication dosage......
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have had them prescribed but have not taken them for the reasons stated in the posts above. I have radically changed my diet and cut out all the obvious sources but my cholesterol is still too high. Since it is produced by the body I am wondering if anyone has a suggestion that might lower my cholesterol production by more natural means. I already exercise five times a week for an hour or more and moderate intensity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisShould healthy adults over 50 take them? Nope. If you are healthy, you have low cholesterol so no need to lower it further. If you have high cholesterol, stop eating high-cholesterol food and run one hour everyday. That will lower your cholesterol level.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHealthy adults over 50 should diet and exercise regularly. That's the best preventive medicine. My running mate is 53. She competes in 42-kilometer marathons and beats the 20-yr old girls in the race. She only started exercising at 50 and now has the body of Sharapova.
Seems like a healthy dose of skepticism here. Say no more ... :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wouldn't like to be a doctor caught between the Pharma Co's whose primary concern is profit and future business and the patient who just needs the best for the issue.
As regards statin use in over 50 apparently healty individuals, what accounts for the reason every NHS, of both developing and developed country, does not function rightly, is a fundamental bias, considering that all individuals are born equal! I mean, the competent Authorities do not think that quantum-biophysical semeiotics Constitutions, as well as their Dependent Inherited Real Risks do really exist, as Public Library of Science admit: Single Patient Based Medicine: its paramount role in Future Medicine. Public Library of Science. 2005. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a consequence of this confounding belief, all subjects have to undergo to expensive screenings and examinations, aiming to ascertain type 2 DM, CAD, Cancer, a.s.o., overlooking Diabetes, ATS, and Cancer (i.e., Oncological Terrain)Constitutions
Only in presence of dislipidemic, hypertensive, diabetic constituion-dependent Inherited Real Risk of CVD, statin use is worthy in primary prevention!
When fortunately physicians all around the world will be told by mass-media and peer-reviews about above- mentioned Constitutions, exclusively a large minority of individuals will utilise statins, surely in earliest stages and in rational way.
Interestingly, when everybody is erroneously considered as candidate to CVD, DM, and cancer, not only NHS expense arises, but also the avoidable Jatrogenetic Psychological Terrorism: without CVD, arteriosclerosis is not possible:http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/apr/03/toby-helm-profile-andrew-lansley?commentpage=last#end-of-comments
Anybody out there got my level of LDL? 540, at last check. Total cholesterol is 599. My coronary arteries are perfectly clear. So tell me why we should just assume that high levels of cholesterol must always be lowered. I feel sorry reading about people who struggle to drop below 200 and most don't have any idea about the state of their coronary arteries. By the way, on my very high animal fat, very high salt diet my BMI has dropped below 24 and my last BP was 118/65. After my last stress treadmill I was told I have the heart of someone 25 years younger, and I'm a couch potato, honest!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAsk any medical expert (I have, many times) why someone should be plaque free with a lifetime of super-high cholesterol, and the response will be a variation of "no one has an idea, and no one is even thinking about understanding." Studies suggest that about 20 percent of people with off-the-scale cholesterol have no plaque buildup. Isn't it time for someone to figure out why?
There exists many forums/web sites for individuals/family members suffering from adverse effects of statins, many of these life altering effects. Doctor Graveline, former NASA astronaut as well as an MD, has a site, spaccedoc.net, recording tens of thousands of adverse effects reported by statin takers. He suffered 2 episodes of transient global amnesia due to Lipitor. Neurodegenerative diseases, myopathies, severe muscle pain, memory loss/cognitive dysfunction, diabetes type 2, severe fatigue are just some of those reported, not singly but by many. I find it more than coincidence that the FDA did not add warnings of memory loss and type 2 diabetes to statins until Lipitor's patent had expired. This "coincidence" convinces me even more that the FDA's primary concern is not protection of the populace, but rather protection of the pharmaceutical industry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is difficult to see how there could be evidence supporting treating all people over 50 with statins when there has never been a statin trial in that population. To the best of my knowledge, all of the statin trials have been done in people who either have known vascular disease or have risk factors for developing vascular disease. To be fair, however, I read the editorial and I don't think the editorialist was asserting that all people over 50 would benefit from statins. He was asserting that the majority of people over 50 have one or more cardiovascular risk factors and therefore it would be simpler and more cost effective in the setting of NHS primary care to simply treat everybody over 50. In other words, it was an argument from efficiency. Not that I support that; I don't, just wanted to point that out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, currently on the NHS people without known vascular disease are only treated if their risk is over 20% over 10 years. That is a very different situation from the U.S., where many low risk people are on statins.
In my opinion, this is an area that cries out for shared decision making. Whether to take a statin should be an individualized decision based on a person's baseline risk and preferences. It is a personal decision.
What I can't grasp after reading a lot of these comments is this: Why are people still insisting Cholesterol is bad?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy must we "drop it?"
More research needs to be done as to WHY doctors and pharmaceutical companies are insisting on getting it below 200...
Is anyone reading this an actual doctor? If so, is there any way to make public the cholesterol numbers of patients admitted with heart attacks? I hear often that many heart attack patients have "safe" cholesterol levels, but this is often brushed under the rug and very few studies are done (why?) showing this. Often the diets these patients are perscribed by their doctor raises their cholesterol and lands them back in the hospital with another heart attack.
Yes, statins are a problem... I think even the scientific community is coming to understand that.
We need to look more at the cholesterol (and also saturated fat) as the culprit though. Just because it's at the scene of the crime doesn't mean it committed it. Saying correlation equals causation is bad science. Really bad science. A correlation needs to be recognized for what it’s worth, and that’s forming a hypothesis to test, not establishing medical doctrine.
Far too often we hear the phrase “eat less cholesterol and exercise more,” yet we don’t even know if cholesterol causes plaque. If inflammation is indeed a cause, “chronic cardio” forms of exercise may actually promote inflammation… so the cure can be another cause.
Western medical has a bad habit of treating an isolated issue rather than the system… often without understanding the system in the first place.
I just think there’s a lot more to this issue than what is being addressed here in the comments, but it’s important to keep an open mind and question a lot the modern medical community (backed by big pharma) has been preaching. If we’re going to question one thing, why are we accepting the premise on which that thing was based as being true as well? Dig deeper.
Read Uffe Ravnskov, MD PhD, books, specifically "Ignore the Awkward: How the Cholesterol Myths are Kept Alive" to get a really good insight into the cholesterol story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry but wrong! Changing your dietary cholesteroland exercise do not necessarily reduce cholesterol to within what are regarded as "safe" limits".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry but true! Changing dietary cholesterol and exercise lowers one's cholesterol level. It's true for 99% of the population. Your case is an exemption rather than the general rule. I suspect you have a metabolic disorder where your body is inefficient in metabolizing cholesterol. RockyBob has the opposite disorder. His body is very efficient in metabolizing cholesterol that his high cholesterol intake doesn't raise his cholesterol level.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis "metabolic disorder" also happens in fat and sugar. My girl friend eats more than I do. She eats all the fatty and sweet foods and doesn't exercise yet remains slim, 100 lbs slim. You would think she has anorexia. But most of us are not that lucky.
My serum cholesterol is 599. Saying I "metabolize cholesterol very efficiently" is not what I've ever been told. My high level is due to a genetic anomaly that renders half my lipoprotein receptors ineffective. Supposedly the effect of fewer receptors is to increase the half-life of the lipoproteins in the blood and thus at any time I've got more lipoprotein in my blood. The literature and my experience is that diet has no meaningful effect on total cholesterol serum values. Neither high fat or cholesterol (21 eggs / week) changes my numbers. The changes that have occurred as a result of my high fat, low carb diet have been my triglycerides dropped from 250-300 down to less than 100, my HDL increased to 76, and my LDL profile shows my particle size to be extraordinarily "light and fluffy" (good).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet's remember that what is measured is never cholesterol, rather a surrogate, a lipoprotein (hence low density lipoprotein) that contains, among other things, cholesterol. Ingesting cholesterol is not the same as ingesting a lipoprotein, so how does ingesting cholesterol increase one's serum lipoprotein level? As I recall, even Ancel Keys admitted eating cholesterol could not raise serum lipoprotein levels.
Your LDL is high because of genetic anomaly. It doesn't follow the cholesterol gets deposited in your blood vessels. That's a function of metabolism. Your high LDL is not blocking your arteries so apparently you have very efficient metabolism and low cholesterol in your blood vessels. But you are not a normal case. BTW high LDL is a risk factor for heart disease but not a certainty.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm soo glad to see so many comments from people who don't just buy into the drug company's ever so obvious marketing ploy. It's probably cheaper to fund this kind of low quality research than it is to buy a commercial on tv. Unbelievable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStatins should never be taken by anyone. The condition of hypercholesterolemia is produced by diet. Even high cholesterol below 240 is produced by diet. The most troubling kinds of cholesterol are LDL and VLDL. Statins do not address cholesterol in the blood stream resulting from diet. Statins only address the HDL cholesterol produced by an individual's cells. This HDL is used for cell membrane maintenance and to form scabs when there is a breach of the skin. It is not troublesome. All dietary cholesterol comes from animal products. The way to reduce high cholesterol is to remove animal products from the diet. This includes eggs, butter, cheese, and any meat. After the cholesterol is lowered a reasonable diet, including some animal products can be composed with the advice of a dietician. But stay away from statins. They not only do not lower the blood stream cholesterol. They also negatively affect the nervous system, the musculature, and the integrity of the cell structure. High cholesterol comes from poor diet choices, and its cure comes from a corrective diet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClearly my astronomically high LDL doesn't get deposited on vessel walls. Why it doesn't may be "metabolism" but that word is not helpful in understanding what is going on. Is it that the LDL is broken down, is it that the LDL is different than plaque-forming LDL, is there another, unidentified mechanism? Do you have something specific in mind regarding "metabolism"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSaying LDL Is a "risk factor" is ambiguous at best. Either LDL Is causally related or it is merely associated. Clearly there are some examples (me, for one) who prove absolutely that at least some kinds of LDL, under some circumstances, are not causal. Approximately 20 percent of FHers are plaque free. To me this opens the door to the possibility that LDL may never be causal, yet the medical community seems to have zero interest parsing this topic.
I agree that statins are potentially dangerous and not worth taking. That said, your high carb diet sounds exactly like the diet I followed for 45 years. Lots of good, wholesome carbs. At 50 I found I was "pre-diabetic" with "impaired glucose tolerance". Reading up on diabetes (you do NOT want to get diabetes!!) I discovered that "wholesome grains" almost immediately get all the glucose stripped from the central backbone of the carbohydrate molecule by the time the food reaches halfway down your throat, and from that point on it is no different than having swallowed a spoonful of glucose. "Wholesome fruits", selectively developed for sweetness, send large amounts of fructose right to the liver where the liver responds by upping the longer-term set point for insulin production (IGF). End result is, for some, an overworked pancreas by age 50, insulin resistance, and the cluster of diseases associated with metabolic syndrome (heart disease, central obesity, high blood pressure). How old are you? Made it to 50? Had your fasting glucose tested?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy diet for the last six years has been high fat and protein and I'm convinced after years of researching that there is no downside. My weight, of its own accord, fell to the middle of the normal range, my blood sugar is now under control, and my lipid profile improved (total cholesterol is still 599, but that is not a problem).
It's best to consult physiologists about the biochemical processes of LDL metabolism. My understanding is LDL is just the carrier of cholesterol to the blood stream. High LDL does not automatically mean cholesterol is blocking your blood vessels. Metabolism is breaking down the LDL to release the cholesterol and how your body processes the cholesterol.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHigh LDL is a risk factor because it means more cholesterol in your blood stream. Your body has to get rid of more cholesterol and that increases the chance that some of it will get deposited in the blood vessels.
Fresh Healthry Vending Workplace Wellness Programs.The epidemic of obesity among children and adults is placing the need for more accessible healthy choices. Linking this surge in weight gain to vending machines has prompted a market for health vending choices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href="http://workplacehealthyvending.com">fresh healthy vending scam</a>
I was taking Cymbalta 120mg and given Simvastatin 20mg to prevent high cholestrol because I have diabetes II. I did not have high cholestrol. I told many times the prescribing doctor of the Cymbalta that the drug did not help my depression. What happened to my life is so terrible - I just never would have guessed the destruction that I have incurred. Two years later after the beginning of above drugs, the statin trumped the masking of the Cymbalta pain relieve. I ended up in ER believing that I was going to die. I had never in my life experienced such pain. My muscles were being attacked by the statin full force. I am off of Cymbalta thanks to my new doc and also off of simvastatin, but one month after stopping the statin - I am still unable to function due to extreme pain. I have lost a year of life and now I am told it may take 3-6 months to recover and also in rare cases, it may take years! Great! A person suffering from Major Depression with no light at the end of the tunnel. Not good. I barely can think clearly too. I am taking supplements and I have always drank a lot of water; I am going to have pfrimmer deep muscle therapy every week for six weeks; I am signed up for arthritic aquatics; I also will see a chiropractor for additional muscle services. I am very angry about all of this - in fact I would prefer death at this point, but who knows - I may be lucky and only 3 months of this suffering and I have gone thru one month already today. I lost all faith in doctors. This scenario has caused me to in fact hate doctors. I suggest to anyone who trust doctors with their life to please verify and check and double anything the doc says. Be very aware of any drug that a doctor should propose.
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