The American "Expert Panel" on Cholesterol

Who is recommending measuring blood cholesterol and lowering “bad” cholesterol with drugs? Why would anyone recommend LDL-lowering “therapy” when we know very well that “high” bad blood cholesterol is in the vast majority of cases just a normal response of mammalian metabolism to nutritional stress and removing that stress is the obvious solution to preventing a number of lifestyle diseases?

Somehow a collection of doctors got appointed to an “Expert Panel” on the subject. Look at the financial disclosures of these docs. They all take money from various drug dealers, many peddling drugs to lower blood “bad” cholesterol. Why are they considered “experts”? Usually because they have done drug trials funded by drug dealers. Are there really no “experts” available with no connection to drug dealers?

Of course no doctor will ever admit to being influenced by money. If you believe that, I’ve got a nice bridge to sell you. But have a look at No Free Lunch and read On The Take.

So, you might ask, who chooses this “Expert Panel” in the first place? Well, it’s organizations like the AHA. Now why would the AHA pick a group of doctors with major conflicts of interest? Maybe it’s because the AHA receives the lion’s share of its funding from the same drug dealers. Here are some photos from the AHA Convention in 2003. Crestor and Zocor are statins,”therapy” for “bad” cholesterol. The AHA receives many $millions for advertising these drugs.

Crestor is another expensive drug peddled by AstraZeneca. How much did the AHA receive for AZ for prominent exposure of its drug?

This advertising at the AHA convention presumably accounts for most of the $230 million in “contributed services” revenue in the 2005 Annual Report of the AHA. It never says exactly what constitutes “contributed services” but we can make a good guess it comes from those companies seen advertising next to the AHA logo at the AHA conventions. These “services” dwarf donations from the public ($91 million). So if you were running the AHA, collecting salary and benefits of $750,000, who would you care about the most, the public or those contributing “services”?

So we can see that the drug dealers control both the organizations that choose the doctors to make recommendations for drug use and the doctors themselves. In any other field this behaviour is called corruption and is punishable with hefty fines and jail time but in medicine it’s called “acting in the best interest of the patient”. Of course these doctors will never admit that their recommendations are influenced in any way by financial considerations. If so, they must have had frontal lobotomies that removed any incentive to act in their self-interest, like all normal humans do.