What, Exactly, Are They? Where’s the Proof?
Do drugs like Lipitor have side effects? If so, what are they? How severe are they? How common are they? Dr. Richard Milani, the Head of Preventive Cardiology at Ochsner Clinic Foundation in New Orleans, who serves on Pfizer’s Speakers’ Bureau, told the popular medical site, WebMD the following:
“Statins are one of the most studied classes of drugs every to occur in medicine … there are only two safety issues. One is liver related issues, and the other is muscle damage… I tell patients there is a small chance they can develop muscle aches… it is only a small chance, but all they have to do is discontinue the drug and give us a call. I tell them the truth; I would not expect this to happen. These are infrequent side effects.”
Bryant Haskins, another spokesperson for Pfizer, also told WebMD that Lipitor is one of the safest drugs in the world and only rarely causes side effects. He said: “this is an extremely safe drug. It is the most studied drug in the world. It has been studied in over 400 clinical trials with 80,000 patients. More than 20 million patients have taken the drug since it entered the market about a decade ago. Any potential side effects, any significant adverse events, are on the drug’s label, in our advertisements, and on our website. To say we have hidden information on this drug is absolutely false.”
After reading this blog series, you can be the judge as to the veracity and forthrightness of Milani and Haskins’ statements.
[Disturbingly, Pfizer sponsored WebMD’s article on Lipitor’s side effects. This is disturbing because most consumers believe that websites like WebMD are objective brokers of medical information. But Pfizer is a powerful pharmaceutical company with a lot of money at stake in the discussion of the side effects of its blockbuster drug.]
The WebMD article dismisses concerns that statins cause nerve damage, citing a report from the National Lipid Association’s Statin Safety Assessment Conference in 2006, which found that “the risk of [nerve damage] happening is 12 nerve damage events per year for every 100,000 people who take statins.”
That same report also claims that “statin drugs every year ‘avert several hundred deaths and several hundred cases each’ of stroke and heart attacks for every 100,000 high-risk patients taking the drugs.”
Perhaps. But if the National Lipid Association’s figures are correct, how does their data square with the data from the Swedish study cited in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Negative Results in Medicine — the study that examined a population of nearly 4 million people and concluded: “despite a widespread and increasing utilization of statins, no correlation to the incidence of mortality or AMI (Acute Myocardial Infarction) could be detected”?
Perhaps the authors of the National Lipid Association’s report forgot to carry the two.
Davis & Crump can provide a free, confidential consultation about your Lipitor case. Call us now at 800-277-0300 or email us at info@daviscrump.com.
To download the full text of our new eBook, “The Dark Side of Statins: New Science That Shows How Drugs Like Lipitor May Do More Harm Than Good,” enter your name and email below.
