This is my family's experience, quite personal. I spent two grim years utterly convinced that my husband had early, early Alzheimer's. Just a few examples of many: This man who'd spent his entire career in food service was suddenly asking me "what color does shrimp turn when it cooks?" and "how again do you check to see if roast chicken is done?" But that wasn't all. He also had trouble folding things larger than a napkin, remembering how to get places he hadn't been to in a while, and many other cognitive function problems. We almost had a knock-down, drag-out fight in the car one day over how to get to an Atlanta address. He wanted to go all the way straight through Atlanta (from west to east) and then north around the Perimeter only to turn back east again across the top of the Perimeter in order to go half the diameter of the city to get to our destination. (If you didn't follow that: way, way out of the way.) His ability to figure out how to get somewhere got so bad that even he realized it and started to simply ask me, each and every time we got in the car together, "Which way are we ggoing to go to get there?" As an entirely separate issue, somewhere along the line I finally convinced him that his growing muscle weakness could be due to the statin he was taking and that he should mention it to his doctor. I apparently had found just the right news clip to show him about statin drug side effects, or perhaps I caught his attention at just the right time. All I know is that his doctor yanked him off Lipitor so fast I couldn't believe it and told him to just let me give him some natural cholesterol-lowering supplements (yes, he actually said that). I didn't notice anything at first, but little by little over the next 2 - 3 months, his cognitive functions started returning to normal. Miracle of miracles, I began to see very clearly that he no longer had Alzheimer's, and in fact had apparently never had it. (Thank God we never quite got him diagnosed by a doctor during that period, despite my efforts to talk him into seeing a specialist.) Instead of Alzheimer's, he had what I now consider Lipitor poisoning. I wonder if there are any Alzheimer's patients who acquired the disease (or just the diagnosis) after years of taking statin drugs? Remember: there's no definitive test for Alzheimer's other than a biopsy of the brain, not usually done until after death. So a diagnosis of Alzheimer's is essentially a guess, based on circumstantial evidence. I had plenty of circumstantial evidence. The real pity -- scandal, actually -- is that cholesterol isn't the bogeyman everyone has been misled into believing it is, so it's not nearly as necessary to reduce cholesterol as too many have been led to believe. However, if one is still intent on lowering cholesterol, there are other ways to do so, and the best is probably Red Yeast Rice. The Chinese have used it for millennia, but of course, that's not something Western Medicine really trusts. No, Western medicine has to produce its own little studies, and one recent study proves that Red Yeast Rice is highly effective against bad cholesterol, but, "What's more, the red yeast rice did not produce the common side effects like elevated liver enzymes and weakness that are quite common in people taking prescription statin drugs." Well, of course not, red yeast rice is a food, not a laboratory-created drug. Our bodies know how to deal with food. Chemicals? Not so much. Other choices for reducing cholesterol include getting more fiber, either through adding it to the diet (lots more whole grains and apples, for example) or by taking a fiber supplement, including the old stand by psyllium hulls. Fiber absorbs and then eliminates excess cholesterol (and probably triglycerides) from the body. And then there are herbal formulas such as Nature's Sunshine Cholo-Reg II, which offers a host of benefits to the circulatory system including help with cholesterol, and Mega-Chel which can be used as an oral chelation supplement, removing plaque build-up in the arteries over a period of months. (And please feel free to contact me for a personal consultation if you have questions or would like more information.) Are you convinced yet that there are better alternatives to lowering cholesterol than statin drugs? If not, read a little more about not just muscle weakness, but permanent damage the statins can cause. |