Apart from proposing a co-payment for visiting doctors, the last federal budget also contained a proposal to increase the level of co-payments for medications. The government seems to have given little…
A panel convened by medical journal BMJ to investigate whether it was right to correct rather than retract two pieces featuring a mistake about side effects from statins has endorsed the journal’s decision…
The recent retraction of an academic claim in a leading journal about the incidence of side effects from cholesterol-lowering drugs has sparked anger in the medical community and potentially undermined…
What we know about statins comes almost entirely from commercial interests. So what we take for knowledge about their harms and benefits is actually information designed to optimise the drug makers’ responsibility…
Nearly 13m more adults in the US will be eligible for statins after new guidelines widened the criteria for use of the drugs to treat high cholesterol and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Using data…
After last week’s controversial Catalyst program on the ABC, some people may be wondering whether they should stop taking statins to lower their cholesterol. But before making such a decision, read this…
On the past two Thursdays, the ABC’s Catalyst program set off a chain reaction of protest from sections of the medical community, aghast that the non-medical media would question the accepted wisdom that…
Cardiovascular disease (heart attack and stroke) causes the most deaths in Western countries overall and the vast majority of premature deaths. Drugs known as statins have been the cornerstone of how we…
A government-appointed committee makes a recommendation that would save taxpayers $260 million within a year, but it’s ignored. And people at risk of heart attacks lose out. Let me explain via a ripping…
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently revised the safety labels for statins, widely used anti-cholesterol drugs. They mandated label warnings saying statins may increase the risk of type 2…