Is it possible to highlight how important this fact actually is? But you would never know that from reading anything that is written on the subject. You have to dig and dig. This information is. buried very deeply. Actually, that is not quite true. The information is not buried, it just plain does not exist. And how can you find something that does not exist?

Firstly, you have to ask yourself the most difficult question of all:’What is missing? Making things even more likely to go wrong, statins have been presented as a universal panacea, with no side effects worth mentioning. Taking a statin is now viewed, among doctors, as akin to taking a multivitamin or low-dose aspirin.

While it is certainly true that not many women of childbearing age take statins, it is becoming more and more common. And statins are extremely dangerous in pregnancy, and cause terrible birth defects, a belief that is reinforced by the fact that the defects fit within the known effects of inhibiting cholesterol synthesis in the fetus. Oh yes, statins are truly wonder drugs. We should be putting them into the water supply.

Just do not expect too many healthy babies to emerge if we do. A few hundred thousand with duplication of the spinal cord: perhaps. Before getting pulled down too far into the damaging effects of statins. Now available over the counter in the UK, there is an increasing danger that warnings about taking statins in pregnancy will go unheeded. Or perhaps someone will forget to mention it as they hand over a pack of statins on a busy afternoon in the supermarket pharmacy.

Or maybe a husband will pick them up for his wife, without telling anyone that they are not for him. I have been told that this can not possibly happen, because statins are contraindicated in pregnancy. Well, so are about ten thousand other drugs, most of which have never actually been shown to do harm. If a drug has not been tested in pregnant women, and which company would now risk doing this, it is often ‘contraindicated’ just to be on the safe side.

However, at this stage I think it is worth pulling two or three facts together again: Fact one: Statins do not reduce overall mortality in women. Fact two: Statins do not reduce overall mortality in men without heart disease. Fact three: Statins do not, therefore, reduce overall morality in :> 95% of the adult population. Something that I have not really brought up, but perhaps I should, is the following question. If statins reduce death from cardiovascular diseases, yet there is no impact on overall mortality, this means that people taking statins must die at a higher rate from other causes.