Four Years Remission – Sceptics & Statins

In 2017 I was diabetic and taking a combination of drugs as a consequence. The usual cocktail of Metformin, Gliclazide, Ramipril and of course…statins. When my GP told me that the effectiveness of the blood sugar lowering drugs was wearing off, Canagliflozin, which would effectively cause me to pass out the offending glucose in my urine, was prescribed.

By this point I was resigned to the dogma that it was going to be an inevitable decline and that more and more drugs would need to be added to combat this downward spiral of ill health and so happily accepted my doctors advise.

Then I discovered low carb and realised (with scepticism and trepidation) that there may be hope after all. After spending many, many hours poring over the works of Tim Noakes, Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholtz, Jason Fung, Steve Finney, Robert Lustig, Zoë Harcombe and more, I returned to my GP’s surgery to ask my doctor if he (or she) would support me in my journey and monitor any problems that may arise should I need to withdraw any medication.

This is when it got ugly, with a raised voice, my doctor began to lecture me on the dangers of such a diet and with unwavering commitment, told me that “a calorie is a calorie” and to move more and eat less, followed by warnings of the consequences of eating so much fat and cholesterol. Despite my doctor’s dismissal of the evidence of avoiding high carbohydrate foods especially in cases of diabetes, I began without the support I had requested.

It has now been four years since that fruitless encounter with my doctor and now that we here in the UK are able to resume regular blood tests following the relaxation of the Covid regulations, I booked myself in and have received my results. My HbA1c came back at 46 on this recent test (a normal HbA1c target is below 48mmol/mol or 6.5% on the older measurement scale for a diagnosis of non-diabetic) and has been consistently below the 48mmol since I began in 2017.

With no acknowledgement from my doctor on these recent results, they instead focused on my ‘high’ cholesterol result and advised that I go back on the statins I hadn’t taken for four years. When I inquired why they were recommending this, their response was that the QRisk calculator came up with the recommendation. This is an open source calculator that GP’s use to assess the risk of a patient for the possibility of a heart attack or stroke in the next ten years. Anyone can use this and of course, so did I.

What my doctor had failed to punch in to the calculator was that I am now non-diabetic which reduced the ‘risk’ from 16.5% to 9.5% which puts me below the 10% threshold. This is all hypothetical when applied to someone who is avoiding ultra-processed carbs and seed oils in favour of real food and so I will politely decline the statins and hope that someday blinkered doctors will begin to recognise the results that cannot be ignored.

The great QOF fiasco. The untold story of the biggest public health experiment ever and how its failure was ignored.
By Jerome Burne
The results of the largest ever trial testing the effectiveness and safety of using drugs to cut the risk of developing chronic diseases were published in the Lancet two years ago. They were astonishing and revealed a massive failure of a major plank in public health policy. Yet they have remained effectively secret.
Conducted in Britain, the trial ran for 15 years, cost 30 BILLION pounds…

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