Should Anyone Take A Statin? Featuring Dr. Stephen Hussey

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back for another episode. I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Dr. Stephen Hussey. He's a chiropractor, recently moved from Roanoke, Virginia, back to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Well, if you listen to this in the future, who knows where he'll be? He says he wants to go back to the mountains, but I don't know. And today. I invited him onto the podcast because a family member of mine asked me recently, I have an abnormal coronary artery calcium score and my doctor wants me to take a statin. What should I do? And I get a lot of variations on this question. I have a high coronary artery calcium score. I have a high LDL. I have a low HDL. I have a high triglyceride level. I have a prior heart attack, stroke. I've got carotid artery plaque, you name it. And so thank you, Dr. Hussey, for agreeing to come back. Welcome back to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

And if you haven't listened to his podcast, cast with me before. He's one of my first episodes of the Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing series, and it's phenomenal. It covers his journey with a heart attack and then recovery. Lots for people with heart problems or concerned about heart problems to learn from that. So I want to start with a little preamble of basically how I view— and, and, you know, Dr. Hussey's got a great book on the heart. I don't consider myself a cardiology expert by any means. I deal a lot with cardiovascular issues because I'm a general internist and I've spent a lot more time than I ever wanted to in the cardiac ICU. And dealing with, you know, I mean, we still have patients with cardiac issues, so I'm still getting reports from electrophysiologists and hearing about stents and looking at blood panels and people with recent heart attacks, but it's not what I do all the time, day to day. But I do have very strong feelings about statins and about the heart and about cardiology. And so I want to start with basically just explaining to people what I view as how all this works at a very, very high and at the same time, very, very fundamental level. I'm going to I'm looking forward to Dr. Hussey giving me his feedback and thoughts on my frame. But basically, the name of the game for cardiovascular health is energy generation in the cell. Because if your cells can generate energy, then they're going to be able to prevent coronary artery calcification, they're going to be able to pump blood around the body and vortex it and create energy, and they're going to be able to, you know, heal arterial plaques, or they're gonna be able to heal, you know, damaged veins. And so every time I look at a case where there is a breakdown in the cardiovascular system, whether we're talking about high blood pressure or blood vessel damage or heart attacks or strokes or blood clots, there's always inflammation. There's always a lack of energy generation. And in my view, I divide these problems into problems of either energy or matter. And what I see is people will have the wrong balance of minerals. They'll have the wrong frequencies of light. They'll be exposed to dangerous, hazardous frequencies of light or frequencies of light at the wrong time of day, like artificial light at night. And so, when you start to have this perspective that it's all about energy and it's all about mitochondria generating that energy, which is really done by making very special water through the electron transport chain, you start to realize, okay, if we just fix energy generation in the cells, all of this hoopla about statins and PSK9 inhibitors and all these other drug classes becomes totally irrelevant. And then when you look at the mechanisms of action behind these drugs, what you actually find is it is essentially like saying the car is going too fast, we should pull the parking brake, which is not— I don't know about you, it's not the way I slow down my car. I hit the brake. And so you see these insane adverse events with— I view them as insane because I would never accept them. I would never sign up for them. So with like statin drugs, which are the number one drug-selling category last I checked, they may have been outstripped by something, but that should be a big clue that there's a lot of money being made here that you should be suspicious of, that there's a lot of incentive for corporate malfeasance, and there's basically no penalty for corporate malfeasance in this context. The industry just gets away with it over and over and over again. Those drugs destroy energy generation in the cell by preventing the production of CoQ10 specifically. And so what ends up happening over time with these patients is their memories go, their muscle strength goes, they lose their muscle mass. And so they may have a reduced risk of heart attack, and that's what Dr. Hussey and I are really going to drill down into today. But my thinking on this is I would rather And I simply cannot abide the idea of losing my muscle mass and strength or my mind, let alone any other element of my body that requires energy generation. I have a deep suspicion that the industry has aggressively manipulated the data on their drugs in a totally malevolent way. And I say that based on an abundance of facts in the historical record and the opinions of industry-leading experts, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Said, you know, in not so many words, basically the drug companies own the major medical journals. They completely control what's published. There's no accountability. These studies are not real studies. They're advertisements for drugs disguised as studies. Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, British Medical Journal, he wrote a whole book on this called the— I think it was The Trouble with the Drug Companies, or The Trouble with Medical Journals, or The Problem of Medical Journals. Easy to find, easy to confirm. And I could go on, but just those two— those two were editors of 2 of the top 5, we call them the Big Five in internal medicine, the 5 top medical journals in the world, incredible power and sway and influence. And so when those people are saying this is a rigged game, you really need to think hard about stepping away from the table completely. Okay, that's the end of my opening rant. Dr. Hussey, what are your thoughts?

Definitely. I think that one thing we— I should say before we get into, like, because you can get into all the, like, the, you know, the statistics and all the details, which, you know, I'm sure we'll do, but at the end of the day we shouldn't have to take something that causes harm to prevent another disease, right? In any way, right? So maybe not harm in a way like it's going to kill you, but like if it increases the risk for diabetes or it causes the muscle pain like you're talking about, or the cognitive decline or any of that kind of stuff, or the sexual dysfunction, like we shouldn't have to take something that has been shown to cause those things in order to prevent another disease, especially to treat something. Like high cholesterol, right? That has no symptoms, right? Right. Like there's, there's no, your body doesn't tell you that anything's wrong when you have cholesterol, like LDL cholesterol of 150. It doesn't say anything's wrong, but you take this drug to make that down and it tells you something's wrong, right? It gives you muscle pain, it gives you cognitive decline, it gives you these things. Like that's, that's not logical to me. So I want to preface the whole conversation by that. Just using logic, you can say, okay, something's not right here.

Can we unpack that for a minute? Because I think this is a really important point. And it isn't, it's immediately apparent to, I think, the subconscious, but it is not apparent. Like it's taken me a long time to articulate, which is that when you get into what I call natural medicine, and if you really push me to say, what do you do, Dr. Stillman? I would say I practice natural and integrative medicine. Those are my two favorite words for what I do. Functional medicine blew up and dominates the search for this. So like I could consciously do that because you like use it in, in a lot of our, our content because I want people who want functional medicine to come and see us. But that was a branding, a branding agenda. By very, very capable marketers. At the end of the day, I look at it as natural and integrated because I want to integrate the best of all possible worlds of medicine, whether we're talking about traditional Chinese medicine or traditional, you know, ancient European medicine or modern medicine or whatever. And I want to integrate them into a framework where they all play well together, they all synergize, they're not working at cross purposes, and the patient gets a great outcome. And I also, you know, care very much about it being natural because I really believe, you know, Jonathan Wright, MD, one of the leaders of the field of integrative medicine for many, many years. I think I recently heard that he passed on. He said, when in doubt, copy nature. And, you know, I can't tell you how many times Osler, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, they've echoed this sentiment that if you look at nature and you, you really try to understand how it operates, the answers for therapeutics will appear, will emerge. And I think in that world of natural medicine, everyone's got the same mindset or similar mindset of we should really focus on how, like, the system, like, good health should emerge emerge from the system as a function of the system, the body in this case, getting what it needs to be healthy. And I think that's so obvious and undeniable that it's almost hard to believe that anyone could study medicine and presume to treat patients and come up with a different framework. But what blew my mind in medical school was the degree to which people would just sort of implicitly be like, aha, like I'll use reflux as an example. The patient has acid reflux, we will use drugs that prevent the production of acid. I mean, okay, clearly this works. You're palliating their symptoms. Their symptoms are improved, but we need stomach acid. And so maybe the better question is, why is the stomach acid production causing discomfort? Like, if you're saying there's too much acid, why is there too much acid? Like, what's the— and, but I was sort of blown away by the degree to which this kind of thinking of like, why are we doing this? It was actively discouraged in my medical education. People would be like shamed, like, well, don't you get it? Like, don't you understand? It's too much acid in the stomach. It's like, no, I'm pretty sure the stomach shouldn't do this if you're treating it correctly. But I really think it's important for people to get that. Like, there is an ocean of difference between the way that Dr. Hussey and I view the body and the human organism and a lot of people in particularly mainstream cardiology, but just medicine, conventional mainstream drugs and surgery, allopathic medicine, where they're just It's like the body is doing the wrong thing and we have to fix it. It is a machine that's broken. There's no respect for how nature is put together and trying to work with the system. You just basically throw monkey wrenches into it and stop the mechanisms that are working that you think are off the chain. Is that fair?

Yeah. It's, I mean, the whole, it's basically an illustration that there is no cogent philosophy of health. It's all just basically mechanistic. It's like, oh, we see this, this gopher pops up, we hammer it down. This gopher pops up instead of asking why the gopher gophers keep popping up. Absolutely. You know, like that's, that's the mentality. And so that's exactly, at a fundamental level, what statins are is, well, not only that, it's like someone's not even getting a gopher popping up. Medicine has gone in and convinced them a gopher is popping up by taking this medical testing and then saying, well, your cholesterol is supposed to be this, which we have no real evidence. This is supposed to be any number, right? We have no idea what it's really actually supposed to be because it changes all the time. And medicine's convinced us that's wrong to sell us this drug. You know, and it's, and if you look at the history of the cholesterol theory, like that's where it came from. That, that's what happened is they literally convinced us something was wrong because they had a drug that could treat it. 'Cause originally they said, oh, cholesterol should be 250 or lower. And then over the years it was 200 or lower. Then, and then we're talking about LDL levels and then 150 and then 100. Now they're, now they're saying 70 or lower and there's, well, paper now they're saying, oh, 55 or lower, right? When it's very clear that the association of cognitive decline and and all kinds of issues happen when your LDL is lower than 70. The highest all-cause mortality of any cholesterol range, whether it's total cholesterol or LDL, like LDL lower than 70 has the highest all-cause mortality from anything. People have the highest risk of death. So it's like that's not matching up. And those are just associational studies, so we can't say it was low LDL that did that. But it's just like, doesn't match up with what we're hearing from the—

I mean, it's like, you know, it's like saying, you know, you know, you got shot in downtown Chicago, It's nothing to do with your zip code. It's like, listen, we can look at data, we can make associations, we can— this is, this is not rocket science. This is common sense.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. One of my favorite ways to sort of test what my colleagues are saying is what does the all-cause mortality data show? It's one of my favorite things to dig into in the literature. And when I started to look at the cholesterol literature, it was very clear. Lowest all-cause mortality is a cholesterol of approximately 200 to 240. And I know from having run a lot of samples on a lot of patients over many years, repeat samples, you know, I mean, patients coming in every quarter for trending a lipid panel to try and fix a triglycerides level or, you know, reduce a high cholesterol level that they're worried about. I may not be worried about it, but they may be worried about it. There's like 10, 15, 20 points of swing in this number, first of all. So I look at a 190, I think that's very, very close to 200. I look at a 250, I think this is not that far from 240, 200. And the lowest all-cause mortality is 200 to 240. Is that what you recall?

Yeah, for total cholesterol. Yeah. And then for LDL, it's somewhere between 100 and 150.

Interesting.

You know, so, and then, yeah. And the, and then the highest all-cause mortality is 70 or lower. So yeah.

Hmm. Now what I find so interesting, right? So just to be really clear with people, what we're saying here is your lowest risk of death is cholesterol total of 200 to 240 or so, and your highest risk of death is when it's much lower than that, as Dr. Hussey outlined. And, and just to be really clear, their paradigm over here is, well, we can reduce the risk of heart attack by X or Y or Z percent, and that's a good thing. So the increase in your all-cause mortality, just ignore that. Our paradigm is there's no way that you can increase all-cause mortality and be doing a good thing. This doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

Fair, fair. And, and to say that like, okay, so we have, you know, heart attacks, cardiovascular disease in general, leading cause of death in the world. It doesn't make sense that, that you reduce the risk of this thing, but increase all-cause mortality. If this is the leading cause of death in the world, how are you decreasing the risk of that and increasing all-cause mortality? It's probably 'cause you're not decreasing the risk of that thing. Right. And that's just statistically, that's, that's just logical. It doesn't make sense to, to say it that way, but, but statistically they can try and make it look any way they want to. Anybody who studies statistics know that you can analyze it any certain way and make it look better or worse than it's supposed to, or get a different outcome. The framework by which we're using to tout the benefits is broken and easily manipulated.

Yeah. Figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

Yeah, that's right.

So yeah, I'm, one thing that I think really puzzles patients is they think the scale of the deception and confusion that you're proposing, that my cardiologist who did years of school and years of this and years of that and has read all the papers and goes to the conferences and spends a lot of money on this, right? The scale of the deception and confusion is hard for me to believe. People are like, how can you possibly question this? How could they be so off base? You know? And I'm just curious from your perspective, what you've read, how do you look at that?

Well, I think that one thing I heard my good friend of mine, Dr. Philip of ADSA, who's a cardiothoracic surgeon. He said, yeah, Philip, I heard him on a podcast and he said this, he said, you know, we have drugs that are very, very effective at lowering LDL. We have multiple classes of them. We have the drugs that interfere with absorption, like ezetimibe. We have all the statins, which like you said, are the number one prescribed drug every year. Atorvastatin is like the number one prescribed drug every year. We have now these newer drugs, PCSK9 inhibitors. We have very effective methods. They all work. The data shows that they work very effectively at lowering your cholesterol and LDL. Yet we still have this epidemic of heart disease. So if the LDL was the cause and it was the main driver, which they acknowledge that there's other causes of heart disease as well, you know, but if it was the main driver and we have a drug and we have a third of the population taking this drug, why do we still have this problem?

It's a third of the population now. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, at least a third of the population are prescribed them. Let's say that. Wow. Now whether or not they take them, which is a whole nother conversation when we talk about adverse events and how they track that, because there's lots of people who don't even tell their doctor. They're just like, I can't deal with this. I'm not are not taking it. So how do we have an— we don't have an accurate report of how many people actually have adverse events because it's not documented. 'Cause people just stop.

Really?

Yeah. So yeah, but at least a third of the population is prescribed them, so has been prescribed them.

Incredible. And I want to point out, I mean, from my perspective, the way I see it is the reason this kind of confusion and deception is possible is that it is so incredibly profitable, you know? And I think I'm reminded of Upton Sinclair's quote. He said, It is difficult to get a man to understand something upon which his paycheck depends upon his not understanding. And so, you know, I think there's so much money available to edify and glorify these drugs. And I know from having read on this extensively that, you know, they'll do, they'll do a number of trials, right? But they won't publish all of them. And when you do enough trials, you're going to get at least some that support your hypothesis and can be published to support your drug. And you just memory hole the other ones, you never publish them. And this publication bias is very, very clear in the literature. It's actually been very well studied. And That's the real problem with trusting what's coming out in the medical journals. Yeah.

And I think what people really have a hard time with is that it, because they don't see their doctor as evil. Maybe they have a good relationship with their doctor even, and they hear this big kind of evil conspiracy type sounding thing up there and they're like, but that's not the relationship I have with my doctor. So that can't be true. And I think that, and they're right. I mean, I don't, I think most people in the medical system are well-meaning individuals. They're not out there to cause harm. Even though the things they may be doing are causing harm. And so I think that another, um, a quote that I like is by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He says, the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And so I like that. It's not an exact representation of this, but it kind of gets you into this idea that your doctor can really care about you and also recommend something that's harmful to you. Both of those things can be true. Yes. And it's not about saying that my doctor's an evil person. It's about recognizing that the information that your doctor has may not be the best information out there. And just because they're a good person doesn't mean that they have your best interest in mind all the time because of the lack of knowledge that they have.

Yeah.

And that's just the reality that we have to exist in. And so then it goes back to what people say, what do I do then? It's like, well, we have to be educated consumers. Stop outsourcing your health to anybody. Like your doctor is just a source of information. It may be good information, bad information that may be subjective depending on who's receiving the information, but it's just a source of information. There are many other sources of information. We have to be educated consumers to what we're consuming, and that includes healthcare and the, the treatments and things that healthcare offers. We have to be educated consumers, and that's, it's a lot of work, right? It's hard for people in the, in this day and age to live their life and take care of their kids and do everything they gotta do and also be educated consumers about everything else. But if we want to be agents of our own health and have advocacy over our health, we have to do that. And again, I'm not asking you to go to your doctor and be combative and be like, you're evil, why are you prescribing this? Because it's like all this research, they may not even know that. Now, if they're not open to that information, then you have to take that into account. It doesn't mean you should be angry at them or cuss them out or anything like that. It just means that you have to recognize maybe they don't know that information. Maybe their training comes from the pharmaceutical reps that come and buy them lunch and tell them about the latest studies that the pharmaceutical trials showed. That were funded by the pharmaceutical companies, and that's their education. They think they're getting the best education there. That does not mean they're a bad person. It just means that they're busy and they have lives too. Maybe they haven't gone the extra mile, you know, to go and look into those studies and see what they actually show because they got, you know, kids and jobs and they're expected to see a patient every 5 minutes because the system demands them to do that. You know, these are all things that we have to kind of understand as consumers of that system and, you know, allow it not to make us angry necessarily, but just be educated and be like, hmm, well, thanks for the information. I'm going to do something different, you know? And that's the mentality I think that we have to have about it.

Yeah. And the doctors have been very aggressively targeted because there's such trust historically. And of course that's being rapidly eroded now because of recent events. But, you know, I just think back to medical conferences I've been to and the way papers are presented and the way they're written about. And then I think about, because I became aware of all this prior to medical school and then during medical school, I was just sort of very I thought to myself how, like, I go to class every day, I read these books, I open these textbooks, and I just feel like I get a completely different story than what makes sense based on what I was led to believe prior to medical school. And so I started to read people like Marcia Angell and Richard Smith, and I read their books in detail. And then I read a really interesting book called Side Effects of Death by a guy named Joon Virapannan. I hope I got his name right. It's an odd spelling because it's not a, not a name I'm very familiar with. And in this book, he writes about how they would disappear clinical trial subjects who were inconvenient in terms of what they did to the dataset. They would miscategorize them. They would outright bribe lead investigators, doctors, professors, etc. I mean, their goal was just ruthless Machiavellian profit, and it was very candid on the inside. And what I don't think consumers realize is, let's say you've got a study of thousands of participants. On a drug and you study these people for 5 years and you find 1 or 2 extra adverse events, heart attack, dementia, stroke, you know, well, you know, their dementia is mild cognitive decline, not dementia. Well, you know, they had a, they had a TBI, so we're going to exclude them from that outcome. Well, you know, they were getting old. Their hip fracture was unrelated. You just miscategorize. And I'm not making this up. I mean, for example, one of the famous studies that John in his book Side Effects Death details is there was a young woman who was a college student. Her father lost his job. She wanted to help her family make ends meet. And she signed up for a clinical trial for an antidepressant and she had no mental health issues. She was a perfectly healthy young woman and she hung herself in her shower in the study facility. And she's nowhere in the safety data. She doesn't exist. Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

And, you know, I get chills saying that because it is such a chilling, cold-blooded thing to do because let's say you study 20, 200, 100,000 people, and one out of those people ends up committing suicide. When you extrapolate that to millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions and billions of people worldwide on a drug class— and the thing is, this all just gets turned into, oh well, they were having trouble with their marriage, or oh well, you know, their kid was not behaving well, or oh well, they're— they were radicalized by, I don't know, some person on the internet, or they were preyed upon. It's like, you can't detect these safety signals and, and statins and heart attacks are not any different because what it turns into is, well, they stopped going to the gym. Why? Because they went to the gym and they couldn't gain any muscle mass and they were chronically sore. And so they were totally exhausted and then they became debilitated and then they have their hip fracture and then they have their stroke and then they die. And no one's making that connection because doctors have 5 minutes. There's no good centralized reporting area. I mean, so this is real. This is actually happening. And the more I practice, the more I believe that. Everything that we get taught in medical school is don't trust your own experience. Anecdote is not powerful. It doesn't matter. You need to trust the science. You need to trust the experts. You need to trust the people studying these, publishing these big studies because you can trust them. And because look at these big data sets, we studied thousands of people. Yeah, but you change one detail and you completely alter the trial, right? The outcome. Yeah. Like one case can tip you into there's too much of a safety signal here and now the risk benefit is gone. This is real. And what I found when I started to actually practice and do follow-ups with patients, not just see them for one visit or see them once a year, but like see them quarterly, see them every 6 months, see them every, every month in some cases, was that they would really clearly tell me what worked and what did not work and what had intolerable side effects and what did not have tolerable side effects. And I don't basically trust clinical trial data at all anymore. I have to, if I'm going to trust the data, it's going to be something like You know, is the nut industry really going to bribe the people doing the studies on all-cause mortality and nut consumption? Just, I don't see it. I don't see it happening. There's just not enough money to be made in selling nuts, seeds, green leafy vegetables. There's plenty of money being made in pharmaceuticals for them to do that. And that's why they do it. And that's just, I mean, again, a matter of historical record, which is why I just cannot trust their clinical trial data as far as I can throw it. If patients tell me a drug's working, I will believe them. But the clinical trial data is just a suggestion, a thought, a suspicion, a possibility to me. Absolutely not something that I actually trust. Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking, he's talking about me, I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why, then your next step is not another random protocol. It's a structured assessment with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call, pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We have a limited number of these appointments each month. If this conversation is hitting close to home, visit stillmanmd.com. And book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode.

Yeah, I would say that statistics don't apply to the individual, right? We can look at all these statistics. Yes. And that, and that's fine. But if this person takes this and they say it causes, they don't, they don't wanna take it, then that, then these statistics aren't true for that individual.

Yeah.

And that's, that's where individualized medicine comes in, you know? But I mean, you mentioned in there, trust the science, right? Mm-hmm. Let's talk about that science. Let's talk about that science we're trusting. Okay. So I mean, we're sitting here talking about the adverse events and everything, and there's one study in particular, the MCR, MRC, like Better Heart Study or whatever it was called. It's always acronyms or whatever. And in that study, there was a 6-week period before the trial even started that they had participants taking statins and anybody who had an adverse event, adverse event during those 6 weeks was eliminated from the trial, right? So then you're studying these group of people And you're saying, look, the adverse events were minimal because the people who had it, first off, you eliminated from the trial.

Yeah.

Like, and that's exactly what happened in that study.

It's a common study tactic. Yes.

Yeah. Common study tactic. And then there's work of people like Ben Goldacre, who's a medical doctor, and he has written a few books, one called Bad Science or whatever. And he basically showed that since there's no requirement to register a clinical trial before you actually start it, we have no idea how many clinical trials are started and then never actually finished or published because if there's no requirement to do so. Right. So basically if they start a clinical trial and it starts to look bad, they just stop and they, it never gets published. Right. But then say that they start a clinical trial and it starts to look the way that they want it, whether that's good or bad is subjective, but it's the way that they want it, that is more likely to go to the, the study just go to full term and then they publish it. Right. So when we go into PubMed, you and I, and we look up the data on these things, how are we supposed to know we get a really accurate description if the negative trials were either halted early or never published? And the positive trials are more likely, and he showed that it was like, if a study turned out to be positive, it was like a 91% chance that it was gonna get published. Yes. And then if it was turned out to be negative, it was gonna, it's like a 30% chance. So what we see in the literature is not actually relevant, not, or not actually accurate, I should say, to what the, all the conglomerate of the whole, all the research shows because of that thing, because of that very fact right there. So until we get some kind of register that requires somebody to register a clinical trial and then it, it gets published, as long as it's accepted by a journal and gets published or whatever, As long as that happens, then we're not gonna get accurate description of what the research actually shows. Further, when you look at the statin trials, and there's tons of them out there, but there's this, there's a one research paper that looked at 21 different clinical trials on statins, some of the major clinical trials on statins. And they basically showed that when you look at it as absolute risk rather than relative risk, that the benefits are negligible. And so here's, here's what I mean by that. So there's this one study, it's called the ASCOT trial, ASCOT-LLA trial. Again, I don't know what the acronyms mean, but, but in this study they had a treatment group and a control group, a group that took the statins and a group that did not take the statins. In the treatment group that took the statins, 98.1% of people did not have a cardiovascular event during the study. In the control group, 97% of people did not have a cardiovascular event. So technically the treatment group was 1.1% better. 1.1% means nothing. It's not statistically significant. Basically what that means is like, to me what it means is that you could repeat that clinical trial and probably get 1.1% the other way. You know, it's so little difference that it could just, it easily could have been a chance, right? That, that happened.

So was it, it was not statistically significant, the difference between the two groups?

No, it just the 1.1%. And you know, if, if I was considering, if I took 100 people, right? And I, and one group took the drug and one group didn't, and there was a 1% difference between the group. I mean, I would say that doesn't matter to me. That's not enough benefit, you know, or enough people wouldn't benefit in order to justify giving that medication. Right. And so. And, but however, what they do is they repeat clinical trials like this until they get the 1.1% in their favor. Mm-hmm. And the ones that they don't, they just don't publish because they're not required to. Yeah. Right. And then they publish the one that's 1.1% in their favor. They don't even report it as absolute risk, 1.1% benefit. They use relative risk. So what they do, which they shouldn't be allowed to do, is they take that 1.1% benefit of the treatment group compared to the 3% of people who did have a heart attack in the control group. And this is exactly what this study did., and that gives you about a 36% relative risk reduction relative to those two groups. But I don't care about those two small groups. I care about the whole, yes, of everybody in the group, right? But when they compare it that way, it gives you 36%. So the headlines say new drug gives you 36% risk reduction from heart attack. It's a lifesaver. It's a miracle drug, right? That type of thing. When in reality, that's not the case because it's not the absolute benefit. And so this paper that I talk about, one of the authors was Paula Byrne and, and Marian DeMasi. They looked at 21 of these clinical trials. And looked at them absolute risk versus relative risk, and they said the absolute risk benefits are negligible. To prescribe it as much as it's being prescribed, the data doesn't match that up. Like, it may be for some individual people, like select people, maybe it's, it's okay. But for the masses, it's like the data doesn't back up giving this many drugs to that many people. So, and that's, again, all the clinical trials kind of use those tactics to make things look better than they are, to minimize the adverse effects. It's all that way. So when you say trust the science, it's like, what science are we trusting?

Exactly.

Yeah. Is it the actual data we're being shown that we're trusting, or is it different? And these are big problems. And that's what, like you said, Marcia Angell came up with. She was just like, hey, listen, I was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for however many years it was, like 20, 30 years. And she said, over time, I just realized that I can't trust these studies anymore. Because they're so influenced by statistical manipulation, by the industry. It's just, it's crazy.

I really believe strongly that the, if we really wanted accurate drug data and treatment data, it would require us to actually identify study participants. And the irony of that is they make such a big deal about this. You can't, it's like, p— PHI, it's very sensitive. Some of it is sensitive. Like, you know, it would probably be tough to find people willing to do an identifiable study of erectile dysfunction drugs. But people are not, in my experience, self-conscious about, oh, I took a statin because I had a coronary artery calcium score of 123. You know, they're not embarrassed by that. It's like, yeah, I have a heart. I'm over 60. There's some calcification in it. How shocking. You know, I'd like to, I'd like us to all know so we can all sleep better at night what we should actually do about this. Right. But you know, it's just one of those, those, like, I don't know. I look at the way that they're so crazy about, about controlling all of this and the IRB process. It's all so, they're so focused on controlling who does the science because it turns into so much money. And because if we start doing the science, it's such a threat to their model. So I don't think that the powers that be want to allow that to happen. Not to be overly conspiratorial, it's just a trend I've observed. So I'm really curious if you had to say, having really reviewed the literature, and to be really clear for people not aware of this, you know, Dr. Hussey had a heart attack, so he has real skin in the game. When he's reading these trials, he's not thinking about a patient 30 years older than him that he just saw. He's thinking about, should I do the thing recommended by this study, right? Where do you come down on the use of statins? Are they ever appropriate? Are they always a poison? And How do you justify that position?

Well, all I can speak is for me personally, right? Because, and I can give advice, like I would do this, right? But that doesn't mean that that's the right decision for another person. And I'm very, I'm a very big proponent of that, even though I could paint this picture that they're absolutely useless. Sure.

Sure.

But it's not my decision in someone's individual health to tell them to take or not take anything. It's up to them. It's my job to educate them. Of course.

Yeah. This is just education, right? I mean, if you had to, if you had to say like what's the best case scenario for their use?

I mean, I, I'll boldly say that there's no benefit to using them ever. That, that's my personal opinion, that it just doesn't, it doesn't match up for me based on all the side effects, based on the fact that they've never really been shown to actually prevent heart disease, you know, like, or heart attacks, you know, especially that, that study that I just talked about. Mm-hmm. Shows a very, very mild benefit, but it's like the benefit at what cost? And where does that benefit come from? Does it come from the LDL lowering effects or does it come from the fact that statins have very mild anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant effects, right? And do we need those if we can get them somewhere else? Absolutely. Right. Because it's not the lowering of the, which is the main mechanism by which statins work is they lower the LDL. If the, if the benefits are not from that, then why are we taking them? You know, and then they come with all these side effects. Some of which are, I mean, there's a lot of literature that shows that they increase the risk of insulin resistance because they interfere with the production of dolichol. And dolichol is necessary for the function of the insulin receptors on a cell.

Mm-hmm.

So if those aren't functioning properly, cuz you're not making the molecule to make them function, then you're increasing the risk for insulin resistance and diabetes, which is, by the way, the number one risk factor for developing plaque in your arteries is being insulin resistant and diabetic. So that doesn't make sense. You also mentioned like someone gets a CAC score and their calcified plaque level is 123 or whatever it is, and the doctor says immediately, you gotta be on a statin. Okay, well what about the studies that show that people who take statins have increased amount of calcified plaque in their arteries?

And I'll show that— we have studies showing that.

Oh, absolutely. There's multiple studies showing that. And I'll, and I, we can talk about potential mechanisms by which that is too, why that calcification happens. I mean, you mentioned one already, CoQ10. You're getting mitochondrial dysfunction, which leads to cellular death. What does cellular death calcification of a cell. There's also, mm-hmm, we don't get the production of geranyl when we interfere with cholesterol synthesis. And geranyl is what links our cellular proteins to the cellular wall and creates the structure of a cell. And if we don't have that, we get this cell that literally just dies down. Mm-hmm. And then the body does what to dead cells? Like calcify it. And then we also get the, a lack of production of isopentyl PP, which is the precursor to, it's what is involved in the conversion of K1 to K2. If you don't have enough K2, calcium is not getting deposited where it should be, then your bones and your teeth and things, it's getting deposited other places. So there's many mechanisms by what that could be. So, but then the cardiologist, you just got a CAC score, amounts of calcified plaque in your arteries, and they say, here, take this drug that's been shown to increase the amount of calcified plaque. And then they'll say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, but the calcified plaque is more stable. So we want that because the soft plaques are the ones that are dangerous and they'll rupture. And it's like, okay, so you want to increase the amount of calcified plaque that you're scared that I have because of the test. And technically this study shows that the more calcified plaque you have in your arteries, the more you risk of a heart attack it is. But you want me to calcify the plaque because it's more stable and protect me from heart attack. Like the cognitive dissonance is crazy, right?

Do you ever go to cardiology conferences and get up and ask questions?

No, but I could.

Would you be open to that?

I've never thought about it. I've always thinking I'd get invited maybe, but I'll never get invited. But going to them and asking questions could be interesting.

Yeah, just show up, grab the mic.

That's like, I mean, they have, they have open research shows, you know, they have open Q&A, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, they're grasping at straws here trying to justify the use of these drugs because they don't know what else to do. It's the same as like, it's the same as them not wanting to take a fasting insulin. Why don't they want to take it? It's not because they don't, because they don't know how to, they could definitely order it and get it, but they don't know what to tell you about it if it's abnormal. So of course they're not gonna take it. That would make 'em look dumb if they take that and you're like, why is this here? How do I fix it? And they're like, I don't know. I don't have a drug to fix that until you become diabetic. I can't do anything about that. You know? And so it's the same there, the same thing here. Like if they don't know what to do other than give you a medication, then they're just gonna give you a medication. You say, is there any way I can mitigate the risk of this plaque in my arteries without taking the medication? They're not gonna know what to do. Meanwhile, the research says if you exercise, you mitigate the risk of a high CIC score. So, but they don't know that because again, they're all trained by the pharmaceutical industry. Their education is funded by it. Their continuing education is funded by it. They're getting incentives. For how they practice from the pharmaceutical companies or Medicare or whatever. They get these bonus checks or whatever, and that's just what's driving it that way. And again, they're not bad people. They're just, they're working in a system that's driving them to thinking the wrong way. And that's just what we have to be educated consumers about.

Totally agree. Not a very happy picture.

No. I mean, I could go on and on about these mechanisms. It's all out there in the literature.

Yeah.

I didn't just come up with this. I'm not the smart one. I'm just reading the smart people's Literature showing this, but you don't hear about that literature. All you hear is about like, I mean, what was it a year or two ago? This European consensus paper, LDL is the cause of heart disease. It is causative. Meanwhile, none of the studies they cite in that picture show it can be, can be cause, cause, right? That can be, they can say that that's causative. There's just mechanisms and associations and all that kind of stuff. But the paper says causative, and then you scroll down to the conflicts of interest and every single author in that paper has at least 6 conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies. 6, like literally the conflicts of interest list was, yeah, at least 6 was longer than the abstract itself. And it's like, I mean, people will say, ah, you can't, I mean, of course they take money from, that's how we do research. And I'm like, well, that's, I mean, that may be factual, but that doesn't mean that there's not a conflict of interest. And like, yeah, I mean, they're basically being paid by the pharmaceutical companies to produce advertising, right?

Yes.

To produce something that can be used as advertising.

So, yeah, I agree. And I think one of the things that interests me is, you know, patients will do what you just, you mentioned there. Well, doc, what do I do about this? And whenever I get a question like that from a patient, you know, let me, let me draw this analogy. Asking a doctor, what do I do about my high coronary artery calcium score is a little bit like asking a general contractor what to do about a 16-wheeler that just drove in through the front of your house. The short answer is you should haul it away and fix the damage, but there is like a whole team of people that needs to come just to to be clear about the— talk about the analogy of like the home being damaged. You gotta haul the truck away, you've got to like figure out what the damage was, like is there a leak, is there not going to be mold, you know, what do we need in order to repair the defect, we got to order that, we got to have it delivered, we've got to find the subcontractors and the contractors, and I got to bring in the power, like it takes weeks, months, right? And in heart disease, the question is really what about my diet, lifestyle, environment, or attitude and beliefs about life are creating my illness to the degree that I prevent it, right? With some of this being just inexorable, like everybody dies, at least, you know, for the most part. And, you know, that's why I think a lot of people get scared by all this because it's like, I'm 75 and I got a coronary artery score of— that's moderate. Let's just say moderate, big window there. Well, yeah. And lots of people die with that score and it never impairs their quality of life. And I think that really surprises people to hear, but they definitely need to hear it. You know, you can have a totally normal life and have these crazy blockages. Like we would see it all the time in the cath lab. Up all the time. Yeah, this person had a 99% blockage, but they just finished cutting down a tree and hauling it away. Huh? How is that possible? It's called collateralization. It's like if you had a bomb go off and knock out I-95 and no one repaired it, what would happen? The towns and the cities and everyone would like change their traffic patterns and install lights or install other lanes or build state routes or whatever to go around it. The heart does the same thing. So in the end, What is required if you really want to minimize your risk is you really got to go through your whole diet and your lifestyle and your environment. And you got to look at all the things. And this is something that I find fun in the literature. You know, we find all these risks. Like I'm going to give a very specific example. There was a study not long ago from Japan that showed the intensity of light in your bedroom correlated with the amount of plaque in your carotid artery. The blackout curtain industry is not bribing the researchers to fabricate this study result. There's not enough money in blackout curtains or blinds or drapes for that to happen. So I find the risk factor data to be really fun and interesting and helpful. Hey, like look at all the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. It's all the things that cause us to be more likely to get all kinds of other diseases too, cuz guess what? It all comes back to cellular energy generation and the ability of cells to generate energy, to heal and to renew and to remain healthy. And so that's why I don't know about— I don't know how you're working with patients now, but we have memberships and programs and we basically put you through this process where we will diagnose all of the major risk factors you have for any major illness based on the literature and based on simple commonsensical questions like, when do you wake up in the morning? When do you first go outside? What time do you go to bed? How much water do you drink in a day? How often do you move your bowels? These are the things we know alter these risks and they alter them so much more powerfully than any drug. I don't think people realize how ineffective drugs are compared to diet and lifestyle. Changes. And I, I'll be— let me give you some clear examples here. If you take a really well-studied drug that actually works, like aspirin— aspirin really does work. I really do like aspirin as a drug. Not in everybody, obviously, but it's got very strong use cases. The data on this shows that you have to treat like 60 to 100 people, depends on the study you quote, with aspirin to prevent one heart attack or stroke. That's like saying we're all going to go skydiving and 1 in 60 of us is going to have a chute that opens. Now maybe people will take issue with that analogy, but just think about it. If you're like, oh, I'm going to take my aspirin to prevent my heart attack, that's the thinking that you're engaging in. I'm going to take a chute that opens 1 in 60 times and go skydiving. And that's why people need to get this. Now, if you look at the diet and lifestyle literature, you might actually find like, oh, there's a 400% increase in your risk of death if you're a shift worker and you're looking at heart disease outcomes. I'm just making that up, but I mean, you really, really, really, really see these massive increases in risk and they're not subtle. And like I said, like the drapes, blinds, like, you know, a lot of this comes down to like forces of nature. Do you spend enough time outside? Do you breathe fresh air? Do you exercise? Like, you know, no one is like bribing researchers to come up with studies showing that you should exercise. They don't need to. The data is already too good. Like, why bother?

Yeah.

Fair.

Yeah, definitely. And I'd say that my number one biggest issue with statins is they give people a false sense of security that they're protecting themselves from heart disease.

They're told it's like a blanket for the kid with the monster.

You're gonna decrease your risk 36% or whatever. And it's, it's a giant distraction from the actual causes of heart disease. Like that's my biggest issue with them because, and I mean, you mentioned like in that parachute example, we're talking about number needed to treat, right? Mm-hmm. And if you look at the statistics on number needed to treat for statins, it's similar to what you were saying there. Like, it's like, so for if people who take statins for 5 years, it, it would prevent 1 in 83 deaths in general, 1 in 39 heart attacks, and 1 in 125 strokes.

Mm-hmm.

So that means that, and that's with the rosiest data possible. Right, exactly.

And so to me, those are the real data. They're spiking before it gets to publication. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Not to mention the fact that they may have eliminated a lot of people who had adverse events and other things before that even. So yeah, yeah, like you said, the rosiest data, the, the best they could make the data possible. And we still got these pretty negligible things, which means that if you're that person, you know, that one of those people in that group of 83, you know, then, and, or 80, 82 of the people in the group with you are gonna get no benefit as far as all-cause mortality. You know, 38 people in that group with you are gonna get no benefit as far as reducing or, or preventing a heart attack. And 124 people in that group are gonna get no benefit in preventing a stroke. Yet they're prescribed to everybody as if this is the thing you have to do to prevent disease.

Right.

Right. And that's the other thing that, cuz like I work with people in like a heart health mentorship program now, just like an online program where I coach them through this because this is the issue I recognize in this specific thing that my information can help with is because again, it's, this is a whole fear-based thing. They're, they're telling you, oh my gosh, you got the CAC score. Oh my gosh, you got this, this elevated LDL or cholesterol or whatever. You have this carotid plaque. You have to take this, you're going to die if you don't take this. When in reality, like I just showed you, the statistics show that there's no benefit for the vast majority of people who do take this. So go— I mean, the number one rule I would tell people, my clients, is if your doctor is saying you need to take this drug or you're going to have a heart attack, say, hey, do you have patients who take this drug and still have a heart attack? And they'll say absolutely. You know why? Because they didn't actually address the causes of what actually causes heart attacks by giving you this medication. There's a lot of reasons they may have given that to you. Maybe they truly believe that it'll work. Maybe they— it's the standard of care, that if you don't do the standard of care, they're liable. Maybe all this stuff. But in reality, what happens is the fear that they have, that they've been given in their training, that if the patient doesn't take this drug, they're gonna have a heart attack. So they're, they're relaying that fear to the patient. Now the fear is in the patient. Oh my gosh, I have to take this or I'm gonna have a heart attack. And why is that fear there? Because we don't understand. You fear what you don't understand. So the way I work with people now is I give them the other things that cause heart disease. Why do we have this epidemic of heart disease despite having these drugs that lower the LDL and fix the problem, right? Why do we still have this epidemic? I give you the answers there. I try and get people to understand why so that they're not in fear anymore, right? That's the— it's empowering to the patient rather than creating fear for the patient. It's empowering them. So now they're in control. They can make the decisions. I'm not telling you to take or not take anything. I want you to make that decision. And if you decide you want to take that statin, that's your decision. I respect it. But I want to educate you on these things so that you can make that best educated decision, that you're not making that decision out of fear. That's the most important thing about, I think, any relationship with any provider whatsoever is to have that type of situation, you know?

Absolutely. Yes. And I, when I don't know the risk off the top of my head, I will go through the literature for patients as I'm able to. I mean, if you've got a really abstruse question for me, it's gonna be tough for me to give you a hard answer. But like I had a case where the woman had had prior colon polyps and was being told she needed another colonoscopy and she just said, you know, Dr. Stillman, what is this actually doing for me? Me. And I actually dug into the literature and looked back at the trials where they'd really done large numbers of colonoscopies. And I said, you know, gosh, it's reducing your risk of death by like 1.6 cases per 100,000. I mean, it is very small. And I don't think people realize how little we're changing with many of the drugs we use. And then likewise, like how much we're changing when they just sometimes do simple things, go outside, go outside earlier. Go outside more often, you know, and that's why in our practice, you know, we just see these transformational outcomes happen when we have the diet and the lifestyle and the exercise and the mindset, all of it working together. And across the board, when we don't see that kind of transformational outcome, I can't say across the board. I have a couple of cases where I just wonder, you know, like, what was wrong with this person? Why did they not get well? Why did our approach not work for them? But that's very rare. Usually what we find is the The fundamental diet lifestyle changes that we know result in improvement of symptoms and return of health, they didn't happen. Now it can be any number of different things that got in the way, but that's what we see. So thank you again, Dr. Hussey, for joining me. Closing thoughts and where can people find you or learn more about your work?

Yeah, I'll just reiterate, you know, what, what I said earlier is that, you know, we have to be an educated consumer, learn and learn, which is, you know, that's why I appreciate you having platforms like this and bringing me on so we can educate people so that you can, people can be more educated consumers. Yeah. And then yeah, if people want to, to look more into my work or potentially work with me, my website is resourceyourhealth.com. Everything I have is on there. So I work with people on an online heart health mentorship program. I have a few books out there, but yeah, everything's on the website or I'm on social media, which is just Dr. Stephen Hussey, Dr. Stephen Hussey. People can find me, reach out there as well.

Thanks for joining me. Thanks everyone for joining us. Take care. We'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care. Emergency care, and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month. So if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening. And until next time, be well.