The Medical Advisor

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, a board-certified family physician and author of the book, “ The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease ,” reviews the underlying mechanisms for heart disease, which for the last century has been the leading cause of death in the U.S. Of all the books he’s written, this is my favorite, as it goes into great detail, giving you the biological understanding of the process of atherosclerosis leading to heart attacks and strokes. He also has solid strategies for lowering your cardiovascular disease risk. Incidentally, once you understand the disease process, then you can also understand how both COVID-19 and the COVID jab can contribute to heart disease. When asked why he’s taken such an interest in heart disease, Kendrick replies: “When I was training as a student in medicine, Scotland had the highest rate of heart disease in the world. Early on the answer for why was, ‘Oh, well, it's because we have s...

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, a general practitioner in Cheshire, England, is the author of three books. I’ve previously interviewed him about his book, "Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice From Medical Nonsense."(1) Here, we discuss another one of his books, "A Statin Nation: Damaging Millions in a Brave New Post-Health World."(2) which addresses the challenges with this conventional approach to heart disease prevention. This is his second book on the topic of cholesterol. In the first one, "The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It," published in 2007, he addressed the basis behind the cholesterol controversy. "A Statin Nation" is basically a follow-up to that book, as many things have changed over the past 10 years. For example, a number of new cholesterol-lowering agents have been brought to market that drive low-density lipoprotein (LDL) even lower than before. "A Statin Nation...

Reduces Risk of Heart Attack by 36%? In the same ad (smaller print) above, it says " that means in a large clinical study 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or a placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% taking Lipitor ". So the absolute risk reduction is NOT 36%, it's 1%! So how does 1% become 36%? Well it uses a mathematical concept known as the relative risk reduction. The 36% improvement relates to the difference of the 2% and 3%. The difference of 1% over the denominator of 3% is 33.3%. The actual value might be higher probably due to the actual number of patients or due to the decimal points. In 2019, the health editor for the Daily Mail published an article touting the merits of statin cholesterol-lowering drugs and, worse, eschewing the "deadly propaganda of the statin deniers." 1 Pointing to an analysis published in BMJ, which suggested 200,000 patients may have stopped taking statins due to negative media reports about the drugs, 2  the article attacks...