Latest / The You Project / #2078 The Statin Delusion - David Gillespie
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: I get a team Craig Anthony Harper reporting in It's
- 0:03Speaker 1: four oh two, it's bloody, it's New Year's Eve, it's news.
- 0:07Speaker 1: I don't even know why we're recording today. Well I
- 0:10Speaker 1: do because I asked David and he's got no life
- 0:12Speaker 1: and I've got no life between the two of us,
- 0:16Speaker 1: los as we went. Fuck it, let's record an episode
- 0:19Speaker 1: of the Year project. Happy New Year, mate?
- 0:21Speaker 2: How are you?
- 0:22Speaker 3: Yeah? Good? How are you?
- 0:24Speaker 2: I'm good?
- 0:25Speaker 1: You don't I could get in trouble saying this, but
- 0:28Speaker 1: fuck it, I'll say. You don't strike me as the
- 0:32Speaker 1: super festive type. Am I right or wrong with that?
- 0:36Speaker 1: I think you're probably right. I don't tend to go
- 0:40Speaker 1: in for celebrating things. I guess yeah.
- 0:45Speaker 3: I'm also just quite happy if people ignore my birthday
- 0:48Speaker 3: and things like that too.
- 0:50Speaker 1: What, yeah, is that a personality thing with you? Is
- 0:53Speaker 1: that just a personal preference? Where have you always been
- 0:57Speaker 1: like that?
- 0:57Speaker 3: Like?
- 0:57Speaker 1: I can't ever see you despite the fact that you
- 1:00Speaker 1: have a profile and you're very public in a way,
- 1:04Speaker 1: you seem you don't seem like an introvert, but you
- 1:07Speaker 1: definitely seem like somebody who doesn't want to be in
- 1:13Speaker 1: the middle of a crowd or be the center of
- 1:15Speaker 1: attention at all, unlike a lot of other public figures.
- 1:19Speaker 3: Yeah, I've well, I guess maybe it's just laziness. I
- 1:24Speaker 3: think being the center of attention takes a lot of
- 1:26Speaker 3: work and is unnecessary for a lot of what I
- 1:32Speaker 3: have to do, in the sense that all the things
- 1:36Speaker 3: I've written about are really about providing people with knowledge
- 1:43Speaker 3: and the tools to do something about something in their lives.
- 1:48Speaker 3: Like I don't bother writing books, you know, clutching our
- 1:51Speaker 3: pearls and wringing our hands about climate change even though
- 1:56Speaker 3: it's very real and very dangerous and so on, because
- 2:00Speaker 3: I can't think of a way to write a book
- 2:02Speaker 3: that results in someone being able to meaningfully affect it.
- 2:07Speaker 3: And it's sort of something that I follow with everything
- 2:12Speaker 3: I write. The person has to be able to put
- 2:14Speaker 3: the book down and immediately implement something at a personal
- 2:19Speaker 3: level that changes something about their lives. And I guess
- 2:28Speaker 3: that doesn't need me to be an Instagram star to
- 2:32Speaker 3: do that. It just needs me to be accurate and constant.
- 2:40Speaker 3: And like I said, probably all boils down to laziness
- 2:45Speaker 3: in the end, because to be an Instagram star, I'd
- 2:48Speaker 3: have to do all sorts of things I quite frankly
- 2:50Speaker 3: wouldn't be comfortable doing, you know, tiktoks and videos and
- 2:54Speaker 3: unboxings and all that sort of crap.
- 2:58Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, I just think for you though, like.
- 3:04Speaker 1: I know, you've got a profile and you you know,
- 3:06Speaker 1: I guess if I asked ten people, have you heard
- 3:08Speaker 1: of David Gillespie, the author you know, Sweet Poison, blah
- 3:13Speaker 1: blah blah all that, I don't know. I think maybe
- 3:16Speaker 1: three or four ossies might have heard of you, compared
- 3:20Speaker 1: to none out of ten for me, which I'm fine with.
- 3:23Speaker 1: But I just think for you, the bigger the bigger
- 3:27Speaker 1: your social media presence, the more awareness around your messages,
- 3:31Speaker 1: Like if you had a million followers on Instagram, not
- 3:34Speaker 1: because you're dancing like a fuck with at a train
- 3:36Speaker 1: station or unwrapping a fucking you know, a high def
- 3:41Speaker 1: TV or I don't know.
- 3:44Speaker 2: Look here's here's my breakfast. Hey everyone, you know.
- 3:48Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of that, But I just think,
- 3:50Speaker 1: like for you, I actually get frustrated because your writing
- 3:54Speaker 1: is so brilliant, and I just think enough people don't
- 3:58Speaker 1: see it, and there's so much shit out there. There's
- 4:00Speaker 1: so much poor writing and poor information and misinformation that
- 4:07Speaker 1: is overexposed, you know. Yeah, And I guess I guess
- 4:11Speaker 1: I live in hope that you know, there's an old
- 4:15Speaker 1: saying and I can't remember who said it, probably Mark Twain.
- 4:17Speaker 3: He comes up with all the best ones. You know,
- 4:19Speaker 3: if it's really news, it'll find you. And I guess
- 4:23Speaker 3: I live in hope that if someone really needs to
- 4:27Speaker 3: hear anything I've got to say, there's enough of my
- 4:30Speaker 3: stuff out there in various places that they will find it.
- 4:35Speaker 3: And m I just you know, I'd love to have
- 4:41Speaker 3: a million followers on something, because, as you say, a
- 4:44Speaker 3: lot more people would read what I had to say.
- 4:47Speaker 3: But I'm not prepared to get into the churn that
- 4:54Speaker 3: is required to make that happen. So yeah, like I said,
- 5:02Speaker 3: it comes back to laziness.
- 5:04Speaker 2: Well, I think, yah, maybe maybe wisdom.
- 5:06Speaker 1: I think sometimes I put a fair bit of effort
- 5:08Speaker 1: into my Instagram, only my Instagram, not really Facebook or whatever.
- 5:13Speaker 1: And I've got across Facebook and Instagram over one hundred
- 5:16Speaker 1: thousand followers, which is a few, but it's not bizarre, right,
- 5:20Speaker 1: But sometimes I think for the time, effort and energy,
- 5:23Speaker 1: and also what's funny is sometimes I will write something
- 5:27Speaker 1: that is, you know, as close to profound.
- 5:31Speaker 2: As I'm going to get.
- 5:31Speaker 1: Like, it's quite deep and thoughtful, insightful, and potentially if
- 5:34Speaker 1: somebody would turn that theory into behavior.
- 5:37Speaker 2: It might be really valuable. And it'll get out of ten.
- 5:40Speaker 1: Let's say it gets a one response, and then I'll
- 5:43Speaker 1: put up I'll write on my whiteboard, don't be a
- 5:46Speaker 1: fucking idiot, and that'll get a nine.
- 5:48Speaker 2: Right. It's like the.
- 5:50Speaker 1: Stuff that is so base and so and it's almost
- 5:54Speaker 1: like the more I swear, the greater the response. In fact,
- 5:59Speaker 1: it's not. It's not like it is. There's a direct correlation.
- 6:03Speaker 1: And in fact, I think you've discovered.
- 6:06Speaker 3: You discovered Ricky Gervais's secret success.
- 6:08Speaker 1: Then I think I discovered before him. I mean, my
- 6:12Speaker 1: second book had fuck on the front cover, and that
- 6:16Speaker 1: was twenty ten, so that was fifteen years ago. And
- 6:20Speaker 1: that my subsequent book to that, which Penguin saw that
- 6:24Speaker 1: was just called stop Fucking Around thirty Principles for Blah
- 6:27Speaker 1: blah blah. Right, And Penguin saw that book and reached
- 6:31Speaker 1: out to me, which I know is not the normal
- 6:33Speaker 1: kind of protocol, and said, we had a look at it,
- 6:36Speaker 1: we liked it, and I sold a lot, right, I
- 6:38Speaker 1: sold a lot of that book, as you know, like
- 6:42Speaker 1: I think in Australia ten thousand is the best seller,
- 6:44Speaker 1: and it was way way, way more than that, with
- 6:47Speaker 1: no distribution, no publisher, al self published, no interviews, right,
- 6:52Speaker 1: And so they went, we want.
- 6:53Speaker 2: You to do a big version of that and.
- 6:57Speaker 1: Anyway, so I spent I got paid to write a book,
- 7:01Speaker 1: as you do, and.
- 7:02Speaker 2: Then I had to deliver it within one hundred and
- 7:04Speaker 2: eighty days, which I did. But blah blah blah blah.
- 7:06Speaker 1: I did all this stuff and then they named it
- 7:10Speaker 1: pull Your Finger Out, which I fucking hated. Right the
- 7:14Speaker 1: first one stopped fucking around, and this was meant to
- 7:16Speaker 1: be the bigger, better version.
- 7:18Speaker 2: I'm like, and I said to them, that's a terrible name.
- 7:21Speaker 1: And they're like, oh, you know, we've done all the whatever,
- 7:23Speaker 1: the testing out, you know, and it really tested well,
- 7:28Speaker 1: and I just said, it absolutely won't work. And I
- 7:32Speaker 1: don't know if you've ever done this, but I went
- 7:35Speaker 1: into Penguin and I sat down in a boardroom with
- 7:37Speaker 1: like ten people who worked on it and marketing and
- 7:40Speaker 1: branding and market research and all the you know, look
- 7:44Speaker 1: and feel and color and vibe, and which was great,
- 7:48Speaker 1: and they were great. Everything was great except the title,
- 7:51Speaker 1: and then that book, which was a much better book
- 7:53Speaker 1: in my opinion. I wrote both it it was outsold
- 7:58Speaker 1: by the first one six to one.
- 8:01Speaker 2: Yeah, just because it's a shit title, you know.
- 8:04Speaker 3: Well, yeah, and you will have discovered that it doesn't
- 8:09Speaker 3: matter what you think of the title. If you signed
- 8:11Speaker 3: a standard Penguins publication contract, they have entire control over
- 8:19Speaker 3: the title to cover everything that's on the front and
- 8:22Speaker 3: back cover, and you they ask you, out of courtesy
- 8:28Speaker 3: what you think of it. But if you it's a
- 8:32Speaker 3: pr exercise. If you say it sucks, I want something else,
- 8:35Speaker 3: they'll say, well, thank you for your input, and go
- 8:38Speaker 3: ahead and do what they were going to do.
- 8:39Speaker 1: Anyway, I told them like I sat in the boardroom
- 8:44Speaker 1: and they literally had this reveal where they had an
- 8:46Speaker 1: a frame with the book on the cover right so
- 8:50Speaker 1: that all the artwork, and they pulled off a sheet essentially,
- 8:55Speaker 1: and my first words were I hate it, and everyone
- 9:00Speaker 1: looked at me like, apparently you're not meant to say that,
- 9:04Speaker 1: But anyway.
- 9:06Speaker 3: I'm having a similar experience at the moment with the
- 9:09Speaker 3: title of my next book, which but I look, I
- 9:12Speaker 3: come from the position of I think, never having successfully
- 9:17Speaker 3: given a good title to anything, and so I have
- 9:22Speaker 3: no confidence in my ability to be any better at
- 9:25Speaker 3: it than they are. So, you know, no matter what
- 9:29Speaker 3: my opinion of their title, I doubt anything I would
- 9:33Speaker 3: come up with is any better. You know, I find
- 9:36Speaker 3: that even when in writing an article. You know, at
- 9:38Speaker 3: the end of writing an article, I have to think
- 9:40Speaker 3: of a title for it, and I'm usually pretty stumped
- 9:44Speaker 3: about what to call it. And I doubt I've cracked
- 9:49Speaker 3: the magic. You know, this is highly clickable if you
- 9:52Speaker 3: just call it this title. You know, for starters. I
- 9:55Speaker 3: don't use the word fucking any of the titles of
- 9:57Speaker 3: any of my pieces or books.
- 10:00Speaker 1: Well, you've gone okay, So I don't think, well, who knows,
- 10:04Speaker 1: I mean, you got you are going okay.
- 10:06Speaker 3: But maybe I should, Yeah, maybe I should. Do you
- 10:08Speaker 3: know there's that new thing on substack where they do
- 10:10Speaker 3: the what are they called the ab testing, where you
- 10:13Speaker 3: can give it alternate titles, and it spends the first
- 10:16Speaker 3: hour dividing up your audience with various titles and then
- 10:20Speaker 3: picks the one that worked the best. Maybe I should
- 10:22Speaker 3: try a few profanities and see what happens. Huh.
- 10:25Speaker 1: I did a just tongue in cheek, completely ridiculous. You know,
- 10:28Speaker 1: how you develop scales and then you get scales validated
- 10:31Speaker 1: over the time. So for my PhD I developed a scale,
- 10:34Speaker 1: but just for fun, I did another bullshit scale called
- 10:38Speaker 1: called the fuck scale, which is friendship, understanding, caring, and kindness.
- 10:44Speaker 1: And it was an emotional kind of investment scale friendship, understanding, caring,
- 10:49Speaker 1: and kindness and fuck was an acronym for those four words,
- 10:52Speaker 1: and it was like how many one to seven fucks
- 10:54Speaker 1: on a like art scale, like how many fucks do
- 10:57Speaker 1: you give?
- 10:57Speaker 2: Right? Anyway?
- 11:00Speaker 1: And it was just complete, Well, that went nuts my
- 11:03Speaker 1: actual scale that I put up, which is a psychometric
- 11:09Speaker 1: evaluation like a real one.
- 11:11Speaker 4: Yeah, whatever sounds boring this other one, you know, the
- 11:16Speaker 4: fuck scale, Oh my god. Anyway, it's what happens before
- 11:20Speaker 4: we talk about our actual topic, which will take.
- 11:22Speaker 2: Six minutes knowing you and me or more. I wanted
- 11:27Speaker 2: to ask you how would you label How would you
- 11:32Speaker 2: label your.
- 11:33Speaker 1: Books or your writing? Would you call it would you
- 11:36Speaker 1: call it self help, would you call it education? Would
- 11:40Speaker 1: you call it something else? Or would you call it
- 11:43Speaker 1: a synthesis of a few things?
- 11:46Speaker 3: It's education sound like I'm trying to lecture to people,
- 11:50Speaker 3: which I'm not. I really really hate Ritchie self help books,
- 11:57Speaker 3: you know, it did really really turned me off. I
- 12:03Speaker 3: sort of think of it more of you as invested
- 12:07Speaker 3: investigative journalism with some self help stuff or how to
- 12:15Speaker 3: apply this at the end of it. You know, so
- 12:18Speaker 3: this is all terribly interesting, but what does it mean
- 12:22Speaker 3: to you and me? And I don't like to just
- 12:26Speaker 3: do the research and not be able to do that,
- 12:29Speaker 3: and so it's yeah, it's mostly yeah, it's that it's
- 12:34Speaker 3: not education. Sounds a little bit creachy, like I'm trying
- 12:39Speaker 3: to teach you something, like like I know it and
- 12:41Speaker 3: you don't, and I've got to teach you. And usually
- 12:45Speaker 3: in my books, I don't know the answer before I start.
- 12:49Speaker 3: I just have a sense that there's something wrong in
- 12:53Speaker 3: what we're being told about how something works, and I
- 12:58Speaker 3: like to dig in, and the book ends up being
- 13:02Speaker 3: the documentation of what I found. And there's been many
- 13:10Speaker 3: starts at books where I find, actually what we're being
- 13:15Speaker 3: told about this is the sum of our knowledge on this,
- 13:18Speaker 3: and there is no other evidence. And so there really
- 13:22Speaker 3: is no point writing a book that says, well, you know,
- 13:28Speaker 3: everything the Heart Foundation says is absolutely correct.
- 13:31Speaker 1: You know who's buying that, yeah, yeah, or a book
- 13:35Speaker 1: that says, hey, the other books were right, You're welcome
- 13:38Speaker 1: the next time.
- 13:39Speaker 3: The less boat into it. I have looked into it
- 13:42Speaker 3: and they were right.
- 13:44Speaker 1: I can I can confirm your honor. Yeah, I for me,
- 13:49Speaker 1: one of them consider I was going to say battles.
- 13:52Speaker 1: It's not a fucking battle. But one of my constant
- 13:55Speaker 1: considerations is like, even like I did a gig recently
- 14:00Speaker 1: for actually for a supplement company down here, but it
- 14:03Speaker 1: wasn't We didn't talk about their supplements. It's just an
- 14:06Speaker 1: education night for blokes, you know, in that health, fitness, wellness, performance, aging,
- 14:14Speaker 1: anti aging, just general stuff, you know, food, exercise, lifestyle, sleep, stress, anxiety,
- 14:19Speaker 1: self management, all that stuff. And I'm constantly going, so,
- 14:24Speaker 1: here's something that's worth thinking about, or here's some information,
- 14:29Speaker 1: here's what we know, here's a bit of research. But
- 14:31Speaker 1: then I've kind of got to go so what can
- 14:33Speaker 1: we do about that?
- 14:34Speaker 2: Though? So that's all well and good, but now what
- 14:37Speaker 2: does that mean to do to you? And what can
- 14:39Speaker 2: you do with that? Because I think as well as
- 14:42Speaker 2: presenting potentially information and problems and current flowared thinking or
- 14:49Speaker 2: dodgy science.
- 14:50Speaker 1: You've still got to say. You've still got to give
- 14:53Speaker 1: them some hope or direction or information or some answers
- 14:58Speaker 1: that they might be able to, at the very least say, well,
- 15:00Speaker 1: I'm going to try this because what he spoke about,
- 15:03Speaker 1: I'm dealing with that. So starting tomorrow, I'm going to whatever.
- 15:07Speaker 1: I'm going to walk for fifteen minutes a day for
- 15:09Speaker 1: the next hundred days and see what happens.
- 15:11Speaker 2: You know, just so people have got a little bit
- 15:14Speaker 2: of an.
- 15:15Speaker 3: Action plan at least that applies generally except for the
- 15:20Speaker 3: topics like the one we're going to discus today, which
- 15:24Speaker 3: is about drugs. And you know, I don't want anyone
- 15:29Speaker 3: to be asking me, like you, for example, at the
- 15:31Speaker 3: end of what we discussed today, so what does this
- 15:34Speaker 3: mean we should do? Because my answer will be talk
- 15:37Speaker 3: to your doctor, because I don't want to get into
- 15:42Speaker 3: a space where I'm telling someone to take a drug
- 15:45Speaker 3: or not take a drug. In this particular space, what
- 15:50Speaker 3: we're talking about is what is the evidence actually say?
- 15:53Speaker 3: And I guess what does it say about us? Given
- 15:58Speaker 3: the evidence?
- 16:00Speaker 1: All right, well, let's jump into it. We're talking about writing.
- 16:03Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of your writing from a substack.
- 16:08Speaker 1: So this went up two days ago. It's called the
- 16:11Speaker 1: statin delusion. Everyone, So if you don't follow galspo and substack,
- 16:15Speaker 1: it's free and it's a great resource, so you should
- 16:18Speaker 1: definitely do that, all right, tell us about the statined delusion.
- 16:22Speaker 1: We are trading the remote possibility of a heart attack
- 16:26Speaker 1: for the certainty of metabolic decay.
- 16:28Speaker 2: Is the kind of subheading.
- 16:31Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and I start with an analogy in the
- 16:35Speaker 3: article and can read that. Go ahead, Yeah, yeah.
- 16:39Speaker 1: I think that might set it up nicely for people.
- 16:44Speaker 1: Imagine taking your car to the garage for a road
- 16:46Speaker 1: worthy certificate. The mechanics circles the vehicle and hums. He
- 16:50Speaker 1: admits the engineers in pristine. The engine is pristine, and
- 16:54Speaker 1: the car runs perfectly, but he insists on replacing the transmission.
- 16:59Speaker 1: This is not because is broken. It is because a
- 17:02Speaker 1: complex algorithm suggests a four percent chance it might shudder
- 17:06Speaker 1: in two thousand and thirty two.
- 17:08Speaker 2: That's funny. You'd call the police. You'd call him a
- 17:11Speaker 2: fraud and a thief.
- 17:12Speaker 1: Yet we thank doctors when they do the exact same
- 17:15Speaker 1: thing with our cardiovascular system. We then head to a chemist.
- 17:19Speaker 1: This is the state of modern medicine in Australia. We
- 17:22Speaker 1: are witnessing a monumental act in pharmaceutical theatrics. Health is
- 17:27Speaker 1: treated as a deficiency of medication.
- 17:31Speaker 2: All right, I could go on, but I'll let you
- 17:33Speaker 2: jump in.
- 17:34Speaker 3: So this is about statens and the interesting thing about
- 17:39Speaker 3: that so well, first of all, what are staturns. So
- 17:43Speaker 3: statins are the most prescribed drug in Australia today, the
- 17:47Speaker 3: most prescribed drug, and I think the stats are pretty extraordinary.
- 17:54Speaker 3: I think it's something like half of everybody over the
- 18:00Speaker 3: age of sixty five and a significant proportion of those
- 18:02Speaker 3: under the age of sixty five in Australia are on statins.
- 18:08Speaker 3: If a person is over the age of sixty five
- 18:10Speaker 3: and also has type two diabetes, they've got an eighty
- 18:13Speaker 3: percent chance of being on Staaten's in Australia. So statins
- 18:16Speaker 3: are handed out like lollipops at the fate. You know
- 18:20Speaker 3: this is this is a drug that is massively prescribed
- 18:23Speaker 3: in Australia. Australia is, by the way, the world leader
- 18:26Speaker 3: in the prescription of statns. There is no one who
- 18:29Speaker 3: prescribes more of them on a per capita basis than Australia,
- 18:34Speaker 3: and we've.
- 18:36Speaker 1: Just sorry for the ten people who are going, what
- 18:38Speaker 1: are they They treat high cholesterol, right.
- 18:41Speaker 3: So what they do. What they do is reduce the
- 18:44Speaker 3: level of LDL cholesterol, which is theoretically the bad cholesterol.
- 18:48Speaker 3: And we could go into why I say theoretically and
- 18:53Speaker 3: you're imagining parenthesis around the bad bit there, and we
- 18:58Speaker 3: might or we might not. We might leave that for
- 19:00Speaker 3: another show. But what they do is they do definitively
- 19:05Speaker 3: or a lot of people, not everyone, but for a
- 19:07Speaker 3: lot of people, lower the level of LDL cholesterol. And
- 19:12Speaker 3: if you've ever been to a doctor and had a
- 19:15Speaker 3: blood test, they'll they'll show you a print out that
- 19:19Speaker 3: will give you a level of LDL cholesterol. It will
- 19:22Speaker 3: give you sort of total cholesterol, also give you ld
- 19:24Speaker 3: old cholesterol and sometimes HDL cholesterol, which is theoretically the
- 19:29Speaker 3: good cholesterol. And Staton's lower for many people the number
- 19:35Speaker 3: LDL cholesterol. And for a long time now, the accepted
- 19:42Speaker 3: science has been that that's a good thing. That if
- 19:47Speaker 3: you lower people's ld OL cholesterol, it should present prevent
- 19:51Speaker 3: them having fatal heart attacks or any heart attacks, or
- 19:55Speaker 3: you know, should reduce the number of heart attacks they're
- 19:57Speaker 3: likely to have or reduce their risk of heart attack,
- 19:59Speaker 3: or any number of ways of spinning it, but in general,
- 20:02Speaker 3: the theory is that if you lower LDOL cholesterol, you
- 20:06Speaker 3: should have less cardiac events in your life. And initially
- 20:13Speaker 3: these drugs were used when they first sort of hit
- 20:16Speaker 3: the market in the nineteen eighties or late nineteen eighties
- 20:19Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties, they were initially used to give to
- 20:23Speaker 3: people who had already had a heart attack, so they've
- 20:27Speaker 3: had their first cardiac event, often young, younger people sort
- 20:32Speaker 3: of around you, under fifty or so, and they were
- 20:35Speaker 3: given to them as a way of presenting preventing further
- 20:40Speaker 3: cardiac events. And there were some early studies that suggested
- 20:44Speaker 3: that they were reasonably effective at that and honestly, those
- 20:48Speaker 3: studies have not to my knowledge, been debunked in any
- 20:51Speaker 3: great degree since then, despite some of the problems I'm
- 20:54Speaker 3: about to discuss with the studies. But the what has
- 21:01Speaker 3: happened though, is that the drug companies have taken that
- 21:04Speaker 3: glimmer of success. And you might imagine that people under
- 21:09Speaker 3: fifty who've had a heart attack, well it's actually only
- 21:12Speaker 3: men under fifty who've had a heart attack. The studies
- 21:14Speaker 3: didn't show any definitive benefit for women, but men under
- 21:19Speaker 3: fifty who've had a heart attack is a relatively small market,
- 21:26Speaker 3: and it's certainly not getting you anywhere near the numbers
- 21:28Speaker 3: I just gave you before. You know, with six out
- 21:30Speaker 3: of ten people over the age of sixty five taking
- 21:33Speaker 3: a drug every day of the week, you're not getting
- 21:36Speaker 3: near that. So the drug companies managed to convert that
- 21:41Speaker 3: glimmer of success into over the last thirty years, a
- 21:46Speaker 3: widespread program of everyone being given or as many people
- 21:51Speaker 3: as possible being given these things as a preventative measure.
- 21:55Speaker 3: So you might feel perfectly well. And this is why
- 21:58Speaker 3: I use the mechanic analogy. The start, you might feel
- 22:01Speaker 3: perfectly well. It might you might look perfectly well. There
- 22:04Speaker 3: might be nothing wrong with your heart to you know,
- 22:07Speaker 3: the casual observer or the medical observer, but you never know,
- 22:11Speaker 3: you know, just in case, just in case, take this thing,
- 22:16Speaker 3: and you know it'll it'll reduce your risk of ever
- 22:20Speaker 3: having a heart attack.
- 22:21Speaker 1: Well, based on that logic, I should wear my motorcycle
- 22:25Speaker 1: helmet on and off the motorbike. I should wear that
- 22:28Speaker 1: around the house pretty much, same logic, exact same logic, Yeah,
- 22:32Speaker 1: which is you just never know. And even though you've
- 22:38Speaker 1: never had a heart attack and you don't seem to
- 22:40Speaker 1: be at risk of having a heart attack, why not
- 22:44Speaker 1: And if these and if the drugs that we're talking
- 22:46Speaker 1: about were completely harmless, like if I was talking about
- 22:51Speaker 1: here was a sugar pill.
- 22:54Speaker 3: And it made people feel better to take one every day,
- 22:58Speaker 3: to you know, you say, oh, you know, I've said
- 23:01Speaker 3: my three hele Mary's and I've taken a sugar pill,
- 23:03Speaker 3: So I'm definitely not having a heart attack today. That's
- 23:07Speaker 3: that would be fine. People can believe what they want
- 23:10Speaker 3: to believe, but these are not harmless. Their mechanism of
- 23:14Speaker 3: action is to shut down the liver's production of something
- 23:20Speaker 3: which is used to produce cholesterol called coenzyme Q ten.
- 23:25Speaker 3: So coenzyme Q ten you might have heard of before
- 23:28Speaker 3: if you've ever seen any cosmetics commercials, because it's often
- 23:33Speaker 3: touted as being something that you want to rub on
- 23:35Speaker 3: your skin or something. I've never quite followed the logic
- 23:38Speaker 3: of that, but it's it is actually a pretty handy
- 23:43Speaker 3: thing to have in your body. It's it's kind of
- 23:45Speaker 3: regarded in medicine as the starter motor for your cellular metabolism.
- 23:50Speaker 3: So it's it's the spark that gets cells producing the
- 23:54Speaker 3: right level of energy, and it's all. It does some
- 23:59Speaker 3: other things as well as as always the body never
- 24:01Speaker 3: just does one thing with anything, you know, and some
- 24:04Speaker 3: one of the others is that it is a very
- 24:06Speaker 3: very powerful antioxidant. So, and antioxidants are pretty handy. You
- 24:12Speaker 3: will recall from how many discussions about cancer that antioxidants
- 24:17Speaker 3: are a big part of stopping that happening because they
- 24:23Speaker 3: reduce the potential for oxidation within the system, particularly when
- 24:26Speaker 3: you take things that oxidize easily like seed oils. But
- 24:29Speaker 3: that's a little bit of the side So the mechanism
- 24:31Speaker 3: of action for Staton, though, is that they shut down
- 24:34Speaker 3: the production of coenzon q ten. So, as you might imagine,
- 24:38Speaker 3: there could be side effects, and the side effects have
- 24:43Speaker 3: started to become really quite apparent. There's a significant increase
- 24:46Speaker 3: nine percent increase in the incidence of type two diabetes
- 24:49Speaker 3: because apparently coinzon q ten is pretty handy in the pancreas,
- 24:55Speaker 3: and so there is a significant It's so much so
- 24:58Speaker 3: that the FDA and the United States now requires a
- 25:01Speaker 3: warning on statins to say that to say that there's
- 25:07Speaker 3: also many people who take statan's report muscle pain, and
- 25:13Speaker 3: it's often the reason that people stop taking them. You know,
- 25:18Speaker 3: much of the spare of the medical profession. You know,
- 25:20Speaker 3: they call that non compliance. Well, a big reason for
- 25:23Speaker 3: non compliance is that people experience muscle pain. Some of
- 25:26Speaker 3: the studies have shown that it's around twenty percent one
- 25:29Speaker 3: in five people taking statin's experience study experience muscle pain.
- 25:34Speaker 3: There's some interesting new evidence that suggests that they also
- 25:39Speaker 3: increase the incidence of stroke, which is a bit ironic
- 25:43Speaker 3: because you know, it's sort of training avoiding heart disease
- 25:47Speaker 3: and acquiring a risk of stroke. And these are all
- 25:52Speaker 3: quite concerning things for something that you may not need
- 25:55Speaker 3: to be taking at all in the first place. And
- 26:00Speaker 3: the problem here is with the evidence. Now there's precious
- 26:05Speaker 3: little objective evidence about the effectiveness of statins, and that's
- 26:11Speaker 3: because of a really peculiar arrangement between the drug companies
- 26:16Speaker 3: and the research group who are responsible for I think
- 26:23Speaker 3: it's twenty seven out of twenty eight of the major
- 26:26Speaker 3: statin trials analyzed and reported on by something called the
- 26:33Speaker 3: Clinical Trial Service Unit, which is part of the University
- 26:36Speaker 3: of Oxford. It's a joint thing between the NHMRC in
- 26:41Speaker 3: Australia and the University of Oxford, and so almost all
- 26:45Speaker 3: the data we have on the efficacy of statins comes
- 26:49Speaker 3: from this group, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem
- 26:53Speaker 3: except when you start to digging in a little about
- 26:55Speaker 3: how they're funded. So they're funded essentially by the companies
- 27:01Speaker 3: and they which once again you'd say, okay, well, that's
- 27:07Speaker 3: a cause for concerns, So we need to be a
- 27:08Speaker 3: little bit careful about anything that they say, particularly when
- 27:12Speaker 3: what they say seems to be at odds with the
- 27:15Speaker 3: few independent studies that have been done. But maybe that's
- 27:20Speaker 3: a coincidence, So you need to dig a little bit
- 27:22Speaker 3: further than that. And one of the big concerns about
- 27:26Speaker 3: this group is that they never publish the original data,
- 27:30Speaker 3: the raw data that is being used in the trials,
- 27:34Speaker 3: So they'll publish their interpretation of the data, but never
- 27:38Speaker 3: the actual data, so other scientists can't look at the
- 27:42Speaker 3: data and see if they agree with the conclusions that
- 27:45Speaker 3: they've come out.
- 27:46Speaker 1: How is that I mean as and I know, I
- 27:50Speaker 1: know we've established that psychology is not real And my
- 27:53Speaker 1: PhD is essentially analogous to getting a Barista qualification.
- 27:57Speaker 2: We've sorted out.
- 27:58Speaker 3: But you can make more money with it though.
- 28:02Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I know, I know, hello, Barista school, it's ups.
- 28:08Speaker 2: But how is that even a thing?
- 28:12Speaker 1: Where like, how in twenty twenty five can we have
- 28:16Speaker 1: companies that have got an extremely huge financial interest in
- 28:24Speaker 1: the outcome of the research fund the research, knowing that,
- 28:30Speaker 1: with the academic institution knowing that should they produce data
- 28:35Speaker 1: that doesn't align with the wants of the bank, the
- 28:41Speaker 1: pharmaceutical bank, then they're going to get funding cut. I mean,
- 28:45Speaker 1: it's just like that. Just isn't how science. I mean
- 28:49Speaker 1: to me, that's not science at all. There's no objectivity
- 28:53Speaker 1: there like that just and I don't just mean with
- 28:56Speaker 1: pharma college or pharmaceutical industry, but with all of it.
- 29:00Speaker 2: Like, if something's.
- 29:01Speaker 1: Funded by a group that has a financial interest in
- 29:04Speaker 1: the outcome of the science, who's going to believe that?
- 29:07Speaker 2: And why is that still a thing? Yeah?
- 29:10Speaker 3: Well, a good question. This is probably the most egregious
- 29:13Speaker 3: example of it, but it is rife. There are enormous
- 29:19Speaker 3: numbers of trials that are covertly funded by Coca Cola
- 29:24Speaker 3: and Pepsi and some on that come to the conclusion
- 29:27Speaker 3: that there's nothing wrong with sugar. And you know, they
- 29:31Speaker 3: don't say this is Cooke's trial on this this is
- 29:34Speaker 3: you know, it comes from a reputable university, and the
- 29:36Speaker 3: fundings come from something called ICSI. I can't remember the
- 29:40Speaker 3: acronym stand for, but it's an international research thing, and
- 29:44Speaker 3: you have to dig pretty hard to find out who's
- 29:47Speaker 3: actually paying for it. And you have to really understand
- 29:50Speaker 3: the study to understand how they've bent the rules a
- 29:53Speaker 3: bit to make sure that they get the result they want.
- 29:56Speaker 3: And on that point, one of the big criticisms of
- 29:59Speaker 3: the studies that these folks produce is that they use
- 30:03Speaker 3: a way of measuring the results which is not standard.
- 30:07Speaker 3: So in a normal trial, you just go head to head,
- 30:10Speaker 3: you say, right, we've got a thousand people taking the drug,
- 30:12Speaker 3: we've got a thousand people taking the placebo. Let's measure
- 30:15Speaker 3: the outcomes. You think that would be the That's called
- 30:18Speaker 3: an intention to treat trial, and that's the way most
- 30:23Speaker 3: science is done if you want a placebo controlled trial,
- 30:26Speaker 3: which is what you do with the drug, right, But
- 30:30Speaker 3: that's not how they do it. So what they do
- 30:33Speaker 3: is they report their results based on the degree of
- 30:38Speaker 3: responsiveness to the drug. So the amount that the person's
- 30:42Speaker 3: LDL was reduced, and they put them in one group
- 30:47Speaker 3: and the people whose LDL wasn't reduced in another group.
- 30:51Speaker 3: And these crossover both of the people with the perceibo
- 30:56Speaker 3: and the non perceivo on. Because you can't see the
- 30:57Speaker 3: original data, you don't know which is which, and they're
- 31:01Speaker 3: just saying, of the people whose LDL was reduced, we
- 31:07Speaker 3: report that they had, you know, ten percent lower incidents
- 31:13Speaker 3: of maya cardial events ten years later or something like that.
- 31:18Speaker 3: And because you can't look at the original data and
- 31:21Speaker 3: you can't essentially do what any study would do, which
- 31:25Speaker 3: is just put the people who took the perceibo versus
- 31:27Speaker 3: the people who took the drug side by side and
- 31:30Speaker 3: see the outcomes, you've just got this muddy in. And
- 31:33Speaker 3: there is a strong suspicion amongst many researchers that the
- 31:36Speaker 3: reason it's done that way is to make it that
- 31:40Speaker 3: you get a positive outcome for statins from their trials
- 31:43Speaker 3: that otherwise would not be there. So it's that's why
- 31:50Speaker 3: there's concern in this area. Now there are studies done
- 31:53Speaker 3: by independent groups. There are independent groups of scientists who
- 31:57Speaker 3: have looked at as much data as they can find
- 32:00Speaker 3: on this. Have tried to work back from the data
- 32:03Speaker 3: that is published about this and have come to the
- 32:05Speaker 3: conclusion that there's by and large no real preventative benefit.
- 32:15Speaker 3: They would agree there is a benefit to people who
- 32:19Speaker 3: have already had a heart attack. There is a benefit.
- 32:22Speaker 3: It is not a huge one, but there is one. Yes,
- 32:26Speaker 3: But they would say there just isn't data there to
- 32:29Speaker 3: support the notion that people taking these things as a
- 32:33Speaker 3: prophylactic you know, or you you with your motiviing helmet,
- 32:38Speaker 3: it just makes any difference whatsoever There might even be
- 32:42Speaker 3: There might even be an argument depending on who's taking it.
- 32:46Speaker 3: You know, somebody with no history of anything, who's relatively
- 32:50Speaker 3: fit and healthy and forty years old, the risks might
- 32:55Speaker 3: be greater than the potential benefits even well, exactly because
- 32:59Speaker 3: of the risk that I outlined before. So we're talking
- 33:01Speaker 3: about things like hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes. So those
- 33:06Speaker 3: type two diabetes incidences are relative increase over a person
- 33:10Speaker 3: who would never have gotten it before. So this is
- 33:14Speaker 3: a brand new disease that they would not have been
- 33:16Speaker 3: likely to get prior to taking the drug. And this
- 33:19Speaker 3: has been established beyond doubt in the research. So you know,
- 33:24Speaker 3: hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes, massive incidents of muscle pain
- 33:28Speaker 3: one in five with muscle pain that is significant. There's
- 33:32Speaker 3: some evidence of cognitive decline making dementia worse, so you know,
- 33:38Speaker 3: it's there are certainly a list of things that we
- 33:41Speaker 3: should be a bit concerned about with these things, which
- 33:44Speaker 3: is why I say these are not lollies, these are
- 33:46Speaker 3: not placebos. It does matter if you take it if
- 33:49Speaker 3: you don't need to take it. And then besides all
- 33:53Speaker 3: of this, we've also had a persistent moving of the
- 33:57Speaker 3: goalposts in terms of what is the target level of LDL.
- 34:03Speaker 3: So and I put a bit of a history of
- 34:06Speaker 3: this in the in the article where they you know
- 34:10Speaker 3: where the goalposts have been moving. The target started at
- 34:13Speaker 3: three point five and has moved so that these numbers,
- 34:20Speaker 3: by the way, are the standard numbers that appear on
- 34:22Speaker 3: Australian you know, blood reports. So when these drugs first
- 34:28Speaker 3: came out, if you had a total cholesterol count of
- 34:31Speaker 3: six point five million miles per later you were given
- 34:34Speaker 3: a clean bill of health and cent on your way.
- 34:37Speaker 3: But then they said they started moving the target on
- 34:39Speaker 3: once they discovered LDL and started to be able to say, oh,
- 34:42Speaker 3: this is the magic thing that needs to be fixed.
- 34:45Speaker 3: They started at the target of you want to get
- 34:47Speaker 3: it at three point five, and then it moved to
- 34:50Speaker 3: two point five, then to one point eight, and today
- 34:54Speaker 3: it's one point four. So each movement of this target
- 35:00Speaker 3: increases the number of people in the population who the
- 35:04Speaker 3: target would suggest need to have this thing right, and
- 35:08Speaker 3: so steadily, not surprisingly, the number of people in the
- 35:12Speaker 3: population being prescribed to these things has increased very rapidly,
- 35:17Speaker 3: until now we are, as I said, top of the
- 35:19Speaker 3: league in the OECD, We now prescribe more statons per
- 35:23Speaker 3: person than anyone else in the world. Yes, so, and
- 35:28Speaker 3: that's a direct result of you know, the well meaning
- 35:31Speaker 3: GP down the road he sees the official target. Oh,
- 35:35Speaker 3: it was three point five and now it's one point four.
- 35:38Speaker 3: I guess before I barely had any patients that were,
- 35:41Speaker 3: you know, needing to have these things, and now they
- 35:43Speaker 3: now suddenly all of them do.
- 35:45Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 35:48Speaker 1: I was just as you were talking, I was trying
- 35:50Speaker 1: to find I don't know if you've seen you don't
- 35:53Speaker 1: look at social media much, but it came across my
- 35:57Speaker 1: or it came to my attention this these papers, that
- 36:01Speaker 1: these I think it was two guys wrote based purely
- 36:04Speaker 1: on fraudulent data and fraud, like the whole thing was bullshit.
- 36:08Speaker 1: So they wrote these papers on these stupid topics, but
- 36:14Speaker 1: really well written. They are academics, really well written. And
- 36:19Speaker 1: these papers there was I think it was like nine
- 36:21Speaker 1: of them got published in like Tier one and two,
- 36:25Speaker 1: which for my listeners is kind of the gold standard
- 36:29Speaker 1: Tier one anyway, papers journals, and I just wonder how
- 36:36Speaker 1: much stuff. And I was just looking then at some
- 36:38Speaker 1: of the stuff I was trying to find. I was
- 36:41Speaker 1: trying to find those I can't, but I wonder how
- 36:44Speaker 1: much just fabrication and kind of you know, I don't know,
- 36:51Speaker 1: bending bending of the rules, but bending of the truth
- 36:55Speaker 1: goes on in trying to put these papers together. And
- 36:58Speaker 1: like I know, one of my friends is going through
- 37:01Speaker 1: this thing now where they're looking at the data and
- 37:04Speaker 1: the data is not telling him a lot with his research,
- 37:07Speaker 1: and so they because he has to produce a paper,
- 37:11Speaker 1: and he's desperately it's not me, by the way, but
- 37:16Speaker 1: desperately trying to find something to write a paper on
- 37:21Speaker 1: and to find some kind of correlation between A and.
- 37:25Speaker 2: B, because sometimes there's sometimes it just tells you fuck all, Well.
- 37:30Speaker 3: There's nothing more boring than you have a hypothesis that
- 37:34Speaker 3: you know, if you do a then B happens, and
- 37:36Speaker 3: then you go and measure it all and you find
- 37:38Speaker 3: out that it doesn't, and then your paper consists of, well,
- 37:43Speaker 3: I guess I was wrong.
- 37:45Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, essentially essentially.
- 37:49Speaker 3: I mean, and we've seen a bit of that in
- 37:51Speaker 3: the in the in the research on and this comes
- 37:54Speaker 3: back to this point about the importance of being able
- 37:55Speaker 3: to see the underlying data. So there was a massive
- 38:00Speaker 3: study done back in the days when governments did spend
- 38:02Speaker 3: a lot of money on this sort of thing because
- 38:04Speaker 3: of the heart disease was absolutely peaking in the late
- 38:08Speaker 3: nineteen sixties in the United States, the massive rates of
- 38:12Speaker 3: increase of heart disease. We now know that that was
- 38:15Speaker 3: because of the massive rates of smoking. But even to
- 38:18Speaker 3: this day, no one's going to admit that they still
- 38:20Speaker 3: want to pin it with saturated fat. But they did
- 38:23Speaker 3: these huge studies where they Minnesota County Experiment for example.
- 38:31Speaker 3: I can't remember how I think it was close to
- 38:32Speaker 3: one hundred thousand people were enrolled in it. I can
- 38:36Speaker 3: you imagine the cost of doing something like that for
- 38:39Speaker 3: years on end, where they were having half the people
- 38:43Speaker 3: were eating a normal saturated fat diet and the other
- 38:47Speaker 3: half had a lower fat diet or eating seed oils
- 38:49Speaker 3: instead or things like that, and they measured and their
- 38:53Speaker 3: hypothesis was that the people who were eating the lower
- 38:56Speaker 3: fat diet and the polyon saturates, etc. Would have less
- 39:02Speaker 3: coronary events than the people eating the normal the butter,
- 39:05Speaker 3: the cheese, the milk, et cetera. And it turned out
- 39:09Speaker 3: it didn't, and so they never published. So this thing
- 39:14Speaker 3: went on at enormous expense for I think four years,
- 39:19Speaker 3: huge numbers of people involved, large, you know, and they
- 39:24Speaker 3: put out a paper that essentially said nothing, so essentially
- 39:29Speaker 3: didn't publish at all. Recently, the National Institutes of Health
- 39:35Speaker 3: reinvestigated that and had access to the original data, so
- 39:38Speaker 3: they went back into the archives, they dug up the data,
- 39:42Speaker 3: and they did their own reanalysis of it without all
- 39:45Speaker 3: the preconceptions of the people who were running it in
- 39:47Speaker 3: the first place, which was to find that eating saturated
- 39:50Speaker 3: fat cause heart disease. What they found was in fact
- 39:54Speaker 3: the opposite. What they found was that when you properly
- 39:56Speaker 3: analyze the data, the people who had more heart disease,
- 40:00Speaker 3: and in fact the people who died more often. So
- 40:03Speaker 3: the higher mortality rate was with the people who were
- 40:06Speaker 3: not eating the standard saturated fat diet, the people who
- 40:09Speaker 3: were lowering the cholesterol, the people who were having less
- 40:12Speaker 3: fat and on actually had not just a higher rate
- 40:15Speaker 3: of cronary events leading to death, but a higher rate
- 40:19Speaker 3: of all causes death, meaning usually that is another way
- 40:22Speaker 3: of saying a lot more of them died of cancer
- 40:25Speaker 3: as well. So you know, we talked some other time
- 40:29Speaker 3: about why that was. But that's why having access to
- 40:32Speaker 3: the underlying data is really important, so that other scientists
- 40:36Speaker 3: can go back and have a look themselves and do
- 40:39Speaker 3: their own analysis and see if they agree with what
- 40:41Speaker 3: you came up with.
- 40:43Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well that makes Yeah.
- 40:46Speaker 1: I wish we could get that kind of second review
- 40:49Speaker 1: on a lot of research.
- 40:53Speaker 2: And being dependent on trusting.
- 40:57Speaker 1: People who have a ender, who have a financial incentive
- 41:02Speaker 1: to produce certain outcomes.
- 41:04Speaker 2: It's not like it doesn't work, just doesn't work.
- 41:07Speaker 1: I don't know if that's going to go away anytime,
- 41:09Speaker 1: because I know funding for research is not abundant and
- 41:13Speaker 1: institution's financial Academic institutions have got to stay afloat, so
- 41:18Speaker 1: they're never going to stop taking money but I don't
- 41:21Speaker 1: know what the solution is, so that other solution.
- 41:23Speaker 3: The solution is government money. It has to be fund
- 41:27Speaker 3: You have to have governments that are prepared to invest
- 41:30Speaker 3: in research and you know, truly independent money that doesn't
- 41:36Speaker 3: care about the outcome, that is prepared to pay, you know,
- 41:40Speaker 3: for agencies like the CSIRO for example, to exist. And
- 41:45Speaker 3: it always, you know, frustrates me every time I hear
- 41:48Speaker 3: that the CSIRO's funding is being cut yet again, because
- 41:51Speaker 3: what inevitably happens there is they have to go and
- 41:53Speaker 3: seek funding from the private sector. If they have two choices,
- 41:56Speaker 3: they either start firing people or they get funding from
- 41:59Speaker 3: the private sector. And the private sector is only going
- 42:01Speaker 3: to give them money if they produce the results they
- 42:03Speaker 3: want to see.
- 42:04Speaker 1: Hmmm, yeah, one hundred uh. The article is called the
- 42:09Speaker 1: Statin Delusion. His name is David Brian Kevin Patrick Gillespie.
- 42:13Speaker 1: It's on substack.
- 42:15Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 42:15Speaker 3: You can also get to it from Facebook or just
- 42:17Speaker 3: from my website. Just go to David Gillespie dot org
- 42:21Speaker 3: and you can get to it from there too. One
- 42:23Speaker 3: thing I want to say about this article, and I
- 42:25Speaker 3: mentioned it at the top, and just just to stop
- 42:28Speaker 3: you and I being sued Craig is. This is not
- 42:32Speaker 3: medical advice. I am a lawyer. Craig is whatever he is,
- 42:36Speaker 3: but he's not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
- 42:42Speaker 3: Before you do anything, assuming you want to, about taking
- 42:47Speaker 3: statins or not taking statins, you have a conversation with
- 42:50Speaker 3: your doctor and ask them about this.
- 42:54Speaker 2: Spoken authorized by David Gillespie, lawyer. Lawyer.
- 42:58Speaker 1: Yeah, and just for the record, but I disagree with
- 43:01Speaker 1: everything he said.
- 43:03Speaker 2: Just fucking with you, mate.
- 43:05Speaker 1: We'll say goodbye affair as always, but for the minute,
- 43:08Speaker 1: thank you again and happy New Year Champ.
- 43:10Speaker 3: Yeah, having new you to you too.