Do Cardiac Prescription Drugs Work Or Do They Just Keep You Hooked In The Money Pipeline?
Many people often overlook the value of diet and lifestyle changes in supporting healthy living, because we live in societies where the power of pharmaceutical drugs looms large.
There are drugs to combat almost every illness and we often look to them for their miraculous quick fix. Instead of making lifestyle changes that can be many more times as effective as prescription drugs, many people rely on the less work approach of prescription drugs in combating illnesses.
Unfortunately we often take it for granted that these interventions are all actually effective in treating illness. That fact is many drugs often have side-effects and many times they don’t work as well as we think they do.
In the video below Dr. Greger examined the effectiveness of blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs in addressing cardiac illnesses, and the results were quite astonishing. In one study [1] patients were asked to assess how many out of 1000 patients would benefit from statin drugs in avoiding a heart attack over a 5 year period.
They believed that 53.1% of patients using statin drugs would avoid a heart attack over a 5 year period, and they believed that statin drugs like Lipitor were 100 times more effective than they actually were in preventing heart attacks.
For most people the actual benefit of taking one or more statin drugs only reduced the risk of getting a heart attack by 5%, and this involved taking the drug daily for the rest of their lives.
“For the average individual the chance of benefit is small – normally less than 5% over five years.”[2] This includes cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood thinning drugs in preventing heart attack.
The bad thing is doctors rarely share this information with patients, because patients would be reluctant to take the drugs.
The study suggests that informing patients of the percentage chance of benefit form preventive drug strategies will substantially reduce the uptake of such drugs.[2]
This would severely reduce the sale of pharmaceutical drugs and hurt the drug industry.
Patients continue to rely on these drugs when they are basically ineffective in preventing heart attacks. Though cardiac drugs lack the power to prevent heart attacks, a plant-based diet doesn’t.
A whole food plant-based diet has been shown to work 20 times better at reducing the risk heart attack.[3] 94.4% of patients who adhered to a plant-base diet avoided major cardiac events
[1] Lytsy, R Westerling. Patient expectations on lipid-lowering drugs. Patient Educ Couns. 2007 Jul;67(1-2):143-50.
[2] P N Trewby, A V Reddy, C S Trewby, V J Ashton, G Brennan, J Inglis. Are preventive drugs preventive enough? A study of patients’ expectatio n of benefit from preventive drugs. Clin Med. 2002 Nov-Dec;2(6):527-33.
[3] C B Jr Esselstyn, G Gendy, J Doyle, M Golubic, M F Roizen. A way to reverse CAD? J Fam Pract. 2014 Jul;63(7):356-364b.
[4] B Hudson, A Zarifeh, L Young, J E Wells. Patients’ expectations of screening and preventive treatments. Ann Fam Med. 2012 Nov-Dec;10(6):495-502.
[5] H Leaman, P R Jackson. What benefit do patients expect from adding second and third antihypertensive drugs? Br J Clin Pharmacol. 2002 Jan;53(1):93-9.
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