Last week, we were amongst the very first opinion leaders to speak out against the new cholesterol guidelines from the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC).
Our error was not going far enough.
Monday’s New York Times carried a devastating portrait of the development of the guidelines, leaving readers with the unmistakable impression that this absurd attempt to make people into patients was not just poor policy it was a hubristic, avoidable policy folly, sort of like the bridge to nowhere and federal housing policy pre-2008.
Trust is an interesting thing; once broken it almost resists reconstruction. Public trust in the AHA and ACC is crumbling as we write and deservedly so, as what should have been clear becomes more confusing and conflicted by the minute.
Instead of giving generally healthy middle aged American adults (like the three of us) the safe haven of a cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention framework that is understandable, sensible and actionable, we got a cholesterol gulag. Only here in the land of the free, it’s not a government gulag imprisoning the political opposition.
No, in a phenomenon unique to the US, it’s a health gulag intended to take people who need advice, support, and guidance and give them a pill, which is the first step in an intentional ensnarement in the medical care system. It’s the Hospital California…on steroids, and you can’t even checkout because that would be against this addled medical advice.
To clarify: we have zero objection to providing statins, especially low-cost generic ones, to people under age 75 with current CVD, diabetes, or extremely high cholesterol levels. The drugs may very well save their lives.
Our beef is with the cockamamie reduction in the ‘risk-to-treat’ threshold from 10% risk of heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years to 7.5% for people with none of the above noted problems.