I’m really sorry to hear about all the symptoms you are dealing with. Your experience with statins certainly supports what I put forth in the above article. As I discussed, our research shows that statins do much more than lower blood pressure. It appears that they can bind important nuclear receptors and affect their activity as well. This subsequently can impact how the immune system is able to target chronic bacteria.

Long story short, your reaction to taking statins along with your description of the symptoms you are suffering from strongly suggests that you have a high load of bacterial pathogens that may be causing you to feel so ill. As you probably realize, this website also discusses a treatment for chronic inflammatory disease that aims to target these bacteria. Many of the patients who start the treatment (the Marshall Protocol) have symptoms similar to yours and were treated with the same drugs you are taking prior to starting the Marshall Protocol.

You may want to read about the treatment in greater depth – however I have to warn you in advance that killing bacteria on the Marshall Protocol causes a bacterial die-off reaction that actually makes patients feel worse before they get better. Also in your case, where your bacterial load seems high, the treatment would last at least several years. Nevertheless it might be worth looking into since the current medical help you are getting seems very poor. It’s hard for me to understand how doctors are telling you that is nothing wrong with you and leaving you with no answers whatsoever about what may be causing you to feel so bad.

Best,

Amy

Being labelled a hypochondriac is practically a rite of passage for people suffering from chronic diseases. The MP may indeed prove to be a good option for you.

Here is the Knowledge Base article on Starting the Treatment:
http://mpkb.org/doku.php/home:starting

Look for my email.

Best,
Paul

I can understand your concern. Generally speaking, patients on the Marshall Protocol try to avoid statins given concerns about their safety. Can your doctor suggest an alternative to statins, or perhaps would you be interested in trying the Marshall Protocol?

Have a look at these articles:
http://mpkb.org/doku.php/home:othertreatments:cholesterol_drugs
http://mpkb.org/doku.php/home:patients:protocol_overview

Best,
Paul

The statin side effects being caused by the Th1 pathogens is directly related to the fact that the Th1 pathogens are implicated in nearly all inflammatory diseases including cancers.

We hypothesize that the differences in cancers seen in identical twins is due, not to their common genetic heritage, but the pathogens they’ve encountered over their lifetime. While the genes are the same, the pathogens are different and thus the discrepancy in incidence of cancer.

You might want to take a look at my Paul Ewald interview who discusses, why from an evolutionary perspective, it only makes sense that pathogens rather than faulty genes cause inflammatory disease such as cancer. He has also looked at identical twins and come to the conclusion that differences in pathogen load causes one twin to develop different diseases than another. Here is an interview with Alan Cantwell who shows some of the bacteria caused in cancer patients.

Amy

That, in my eyes is a very insightful observation, and one that crossed my mind as well while reading the reports of cognitive loss in women on statins. Could the reported side-effects of statins really just be immunopathology (for the most part)?

At this point essentially no research has been done that addresses the effects of statins on the nuclear receptors (except Marshall’s) so it’s hard to know. But one thing I have noticed is that some people seem to be much more impacted by what are being called the side effects of statins than other people. Could it it be that people who harbor more Th1 pathogens are the ones to note greater side effects from statins? Wouldn’t it be great if more studies investigated that possibility?

A researcher named Uffe Ravnskov, published a comment in the British Medical Journal about the recent IDEAL trial, which compared patients taking the statin simvastatin to patients taking the statin atorvastatin. The researchers found that almost 90% of participants in both groups had side effects. Half were considered serious. Well, I’d say at least 90% of the older adults usually prescribed statins have accumulated enough Th1 pathogens for the drugs to cause them to experience immunopathology and that’s quite a heavy load of side effects for people taking statins to endure.

Read this article by Ravnskov, which describes the top side effects observed among patients taking statins. They sound very similar to the symptoms patients on the MP report as a result of immunopathology.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/332/7553/1330?ijkey=XhTeJopzPkacsS2&keytype=ref

Too bad it all has to be speculative at this point. Each statin is so different in terms of what nuclear receptors it binds that we cannot even generalize about them as a class. All I know is that something fishy is going on, and that there are more to statins then meets the eye.

Best,

Amy

Just read your March 1 piece on the side effects of the statins. You (correctly, in my view) hypothesize the brain fog side effect of Lipitor as bacterial die off of pathogens in the brain. This, according to the data, is the #2 side effect, second only to muscle soreness.

Why limit our scope to brain fog? Could we not hypothesize the muscle soreness as being the result of bacteria die off there (Fibromyalgia)? This would give us the top 2 “side effects”, both explained by the MP revelation.

So, you know where I’m going here, what are the #3, #4, etc. most common “side effects” of these medications? Do they fit into the autoimmune disease family of chronic diseases?

Do you plan to include this information in your upcoming presentation with Trevor?

Phil