Some of my patients were no longer diabetic when they were taken off their statin.
Click to view the full JAMA Article »
When I started practicing medicine, I realized that there were many medical problems and patient symptoms which had no treatment approved by the FDA. This was frustrating and I realized I had a talent for finding alternate treatments that were compounded by a compounding pharmacy for my patients. I followed research, basic science and the advice of a compounding pharmacist to find these treatments, and miraculously they worked! Many of those treatments are now accepted by the mainstream medical establishment and even the FDA. That was over 35 years ago…
I have continued to research treatments to address the problems of my patients. Many times, I have read research novel uses for an old drug or research that finally documents the treatments I have been successfully employing in my practice for years. My husband is a really entertaining guy and when I tell my husband that mainstream medicine has finally accepted and now endorses a treatment I have been using for 10-20 years, he has a pat response: He sings an old Mac Davis song,, “Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble when you’re perfect in every way……your medical discovery is finally endorsed!”. He is making sure I don’t get full of myself because I found a treatment long before the “other guys”.
It is one of my two favorite things…finding the answer for a patient’s pain or illness! It is hard to wait for the huge leviathan of medical knowledge to finally endorse what I have been seeing and using for years!
The practice of medicine was and is supposed to be using what a doctor knows, has learned and what she has read in the form of research, to deductively find a solution for individual patients, instead of following a well-worn algorithm that rarely works. What most patients experience in the doctor’s office is a watered-down treatment, orchestrated by the insurance companies to save them money and to pay doctors very little for their work. They only pay for 5 minutes of a doctor’s visit and decrease what they pay every year, so that doctors are expected to treat one thing at a time, and never has time to look at the whole patient picture. It is one of the reasons I left the practice of insurance run medicine…I wanted to be able to put the pieces together for each patient and create a treatment plan to make each patient healthier so they could enjoy a quality life. That is what I do now…I live the dream of most doctors. I have enough time to look over every part of a patients’s life and create a workable plan that involves not only hormones but treatment of pre-diabetes and Pre-heart disease and other diseases of aging. Making people healthy has always been my goal and in the last 20 years I have been able to do so!
This situation came up recently when I read a research article in the Journal of the AMA (JAMA) that stated that Statins, such as Rosuvastatin, atorvastatin, simvastatin, and pravastatin, frequently make patients’ diabetes worse. The title stated, “Association of Statin Therapy Initiation with Diabetes Progression”. This is something I discovered in private practice, and from reading research a long time ago, but the majority of the doctors in my community contradicted my advice to my patients to stop statins, if they had not had a heart attack, so their diabetes would improve, and it always did. Some of my patients were no longer diabetic when they were taken off their statin. If they had a lot of plaque on their arteries, I put them on Zetia, a non-statin lipid lowering drug, which did not affect their AODM. I was ecstatic when I read in JAMA that now the majority of the doctors will treat patients like I have for the last decade.
Think this through logically. Why would you take a medication to lower your chance of heart disease if you weren’t at risk for it anyway. A high cholesterol doesn’t mean you have arterial plaque. Many patients have high cholesterol and have no plaque in their vessels. If that is you, you could be taking a drug to prevent a problem you’ll never have, and develop type 2 diabetes, a disease that can cause heart disease and damage to your arteries.
My advice is to take statins only if you have had a heart attack, had stents placed, or a stroke from arteriosclerosis. If you have a cardia calcium scan of zero-50, and have not had any of the previously mentioned heart problems, then statins aren’t doing you any good, and they might cause you to have type II diabetes, which in itself can cause heart disease and strokes.
So, for all the times I have been criticized for treatments that work, don’t cause complications and make people well, I am now tooting my own horn like Mac Davis did in his song. The proof is in the current medical articles that appeared years after I already treated patients with this “new discovery”. I am just thankful that I can have the time and motivation to practice like am able to do now.
More importantly take a statin only if you need it, in other words, only if you already have proven arteriosclerosis.
This Health cast was written and presented by Dr. Kathy Maupin, M.D., Bio-identical Hormone Replacement Expert and Author. www.BioBalanceHealth.com • (314) 993-0963.
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