I used to be a reasonable intelligent person but after ten days on statins I became a mental zombie. I couldn’t remember anything for more than a few seconds I entered a world of forgetfulness and confusion that was just about as scary as the event that got me put on statins! I am on a lower dose now and the cloud has somewhat lifted, but I am still not mentally the person I used to be.
Hi it’s parris from epicreviewguys and that much i remember. but since i was put on statins earlier this year, what’s scary is how much i forget. now when i was younger, i used to think the whole field of medicine was sacrosanct, that doctors were above the rest of us and you should trust everything that they say, that people were basically looking out for our best and the
Drug companies working on making the drugs that medicines that people needed, not the ones that would make them the most money. but over the last 10-15 years i’ve been disabused of that notion and so now i am as suspicious of medicine as of everything else. is that part of getting older? how why old people are so grumpy and cranky they don’t trust anything. well, then i guess
That’s happening to me, the more you learn, the now i don’t think 15-20 years ago anyone would’ve thought to review medicines, the pharmaceutical companies were supposed to make sure they were effective with their testing and reviews, and the fda was supposed to make sure they were safe, at least that’s how it was supposed to work. but now, what do you see on tv? every other
Ad is for some medicine or drug. so if the drug companies want their products to be as seen on tv, then i’ll review them today’s product we’re looking at is statins. now my experience firsthand with statins is just been in the past year but they’ve been out for a long time and they’re quickly becoming, if not already the most prescribed drug in the united states. apparently,
Everyone can benefit from them, that’s what they say now. let me tell you briefly about the history of statins and then i’ll okay, well i remember from reading about the history of statins is, they were originally designed to treat a condition were a person’s body would produce too much cholesterol. because cholesterol, as bad as it sounds, is what you-every cell in your
Body needs to live, and you actually make 80% of the cholesterol in your body. so you only have control with eating over that extra 20%. the good thing about the cholesterol made in your body though is as your body needs it, it sends out chemical signals that go to where it’s made and then that produces the cholesterol you need. it’s supposed to be a good system. now some
People have a defect in that system and their body would just keep producing cholesterol. when you have more than you need, it gets into the arteries, it clogs them up, lots of other bad stuff happens. so, that’s about 1 in 500 people has that condition and that’s actually what statins were made to work for and i’m sure there are very good medicine for that because you don’t
Want to have your blood full of cholesterol all the time, it will definitely shorten your life. but, 1 out of 500 people, how many doses of this you’re going to sell? what if it’s 1 out of every 2 or 3 people? think how much more you can sell. well, what you need to do then is convince the doctors who prescribe statins that almost everybody needs them, and so for that to
Happen, cholesterol has to be made into the bad guy and statins are the hero that rides in to save the day. now eating foods that are high in cholesterol which basically loads your body up with more cholesterol that it can use and so it gets deposited in the arteries and so forth. that is definitely a bad thing, i will tell you having had a medical scare earlier this year,
When they put in the statins that now i understand why diet is important then you can’t be pouring that cholesterol into you so i took my doctor’s advice very seriously and went into a largely vegan vegetarian diet, completely changed up what i ate and my health has certainly improved for that. however, my doctor also insisted that i start on statins. now, i didn’t have
High cholesterol at the time, i think that number they look at, that when you get over 150 it’s considered high, i was like 130, 135. i never had high cholesterol, never had my doctor say, “oh look at this number, it’s not good.” it was always within range. but they said, “well what we’d really like for you is to get your so i made the dietary changes and they put me on
Statin 40mg dose which is right in the middle of what they can give you, and they said, “come back in a month or so because we have to check your liver to make sure it’s not being destroyed.” i thought, “well how is it exactly is that related to this.” well, among the many effects statins can have on you, side effects, is it can cause muscle wasting where your muscle sort
Of dissolves i guess. it goes into your bloodstream and then your liver has to work hard to pull all that protein, all that dissolved muscle out of the blood and you basically can damage your liver that way. so the muscle, you can always grow back but the liver once you damage it, that’s not going to come back so it’s a pretty serious thing, and i went back for my follow-up
Testing. fortunately, my liver was fine but they said, “oh look, your cholesterol level, you’ve done a very good job. it’s now 47.” now that was great news not just because i had lowered my cholesterol as they have wanted, but it had gotten so low that i knew they were going to reduce my dosage of the statin and i had been having a very hard time with this. it started,
Again i was on 40 mg, somewhere around-i would remember better if i could as best i remember, it started a week or 10 days after i started it, this does take a while to build up in your system, to get to your serum level to a certain point. when that happens, your cells which normally send out a signal saying, “hey, we need some cholesterol here for this.” your brain cells
Send out a chemical messenger saying, “hey, we need some cholesterol because we got a thought and we’d like to remember it more than 5 seconds from now. we can keep it here in the front of our head but if we change our focus to anything else, we’re going to lose that thought.” and so i understand it, the statins go in and interrupt the process of the cells sending out the
Message saying, “hey, need some cholesterol to be produced and sent over here.” now you got a disconnect, so what do your cells do? what is brain your do? it desperately needs cholesterol, you need that for so many functions every day in your life throughout your body, is it goes to the only other source it can which is in your blood, and so it starts working double time
Looking for the whichever kind of ldl it is that carries the cholesterol with it, and it pulls it out so you got the cells of the body and the brain all desperately looking for cholesterol and it finds cholesterol in the blood every so often, it pulls that out. what happens, your blood cholesterol numbers goes down and you doctors says you’re healthy. but what’s really
Going on is you’ve interrupted that messaging system in your body of “i need cholesterol.” “okay. i’ll make some more cholesterol and send it over.” you’ve interrupted that and your body desperately is trying to find cholesterol, so it pulls it out of your blood. so, you’re basically starving the cells that need the cholesterol and forcing them to go out on a desperate
Hunt for it. which means, are your cells going to work at optimum capacity when they’re in that state? and also, when your cholesterol gets really low like mine was down to 47, even pulling it out of the blood, there just isn’t enough cholesterol there to do the job, and so the first thing i noticed was the mental basically, i felt like i just about lost my short-term
Memory. i would think, “oh, i got to go do that thing in the other room.” and i would get up to go over there, and i would notice that the bird feeder is empty along the way and i would go, “okay, got to fill the bird feeder.” and then, i could not for the life of me, remember what i originally went. it got so bad that walking just from the bedroom to the kitchen and “oh,
I better get the dishes going, it’s getting kind of late.” and walking through the living room, i would see they left the wii on or something. i’d go over having noticed it, go over and push the button. by the time i have done that, i could not remember where i was going or what i had intended to do. now there are other physical conditions that can cause this including
Getting older. but it doesn’t usually doesn’t hit you over the course of 10 days. obviously, it was the medicine that was doing that to me but because of that medical scare that i had, i was more afraid of that. at that point, i didn’t want to go back and tell the doctor, “hey this medicine is really messing me up.” i knew weird stuff was going on and i read online that
Some of the side effects some people noticed was you would have confusion and forgetfulness. you would have mood changes, mood disorders which i didn’t notice but i would say right about that same time my wife said, “you’re acting very strange lately.” “what do you mean?” i may be in general, occasionally moody person, i will confess to that. but my wife and the kids,
Because i asked them after my wife said, “am i really acting like this?” that my mood would just change like that and they thought i was the other common side effect of statins is this muscle pain and the muscle wasting that happens. now that took another couple of months before i started to notice that. i guess it took some time to dissolve those muscles, now not to the
Extent that i had the liver damage or my-whatever those numbers they test for were off by very much. but it was enough that i would have weird muscle pains at strange times. i was waking up at the middle of the night with cramps and places that i never had cramps before. it was all just weird things were happening to my muscles. but my forgetfulness and i would say to some
Extent, my ability to reason was affected by statins so much so that when i went in for that first blood test check-up results with the doctor, i was prepared to say,”i understand how this medication can help me cardiovascularly and how it can give me a healthier life, extend my life and so forth. but if this are the effects that i have to live with, if i’m going to lose
My short-term memory and act weird and strange to the people who know me, i’m not sure how much this would give me is worth compared to it what’s it taking fortunately, because i had gotten my cholesterol so low, my dose was decreased, and currently this is 7 or 8 months later, i’m now on 10 mg. well, that’s what they put me on, what i’m actually taking is 5mg because i
Was still having just too much in the way of these problems even on 10. so i thought, “well i’ll break the tablets in half, half is probably better than nothing.” but 5 really seems like that can’t be doing much. but i still feel like-well, i guess you could say i haven’t recovered from that being on that initial high dose and blowing away my short-term memory or the dose
That i’m on now is still having enough of an effect that i can still see that i’m now i understand that mental capability self-assessment can be very subjective, but i actually board game with colored pegs and a little thing that hides the person who selects the pattern with the pegs, and the other person puts the colored pegs in and you have to tell them with the black
And white pegs, how many of them are the right color, the right spot, the right color, the wrong spot, and then they guess again, guess again until they figure out the pattern. now i’ve always been pretty good at that, not great but 7 or 8 rows in, i could almost always guess the pattern. now my daughter wanted to play this with me a couple of weeks ago. it was at night,
Now maybe i should try it during the day when i’m a little more awake. but i used to never have a problem with that game, i enjoyed it and when we tried to play it, i was going on to 12 and 15 rows and i couldn’t get the solution. now it’s not just being dumb, it’s that to play that game, you need to keep a whole bunch of things right in the front of your head because you
Have to say to yourself, “okay, now i tested with the yellows here and this place because those 3 were the right color. then i know that the yellow..” and so it’s building on that and to keep a whole bunch of facts floating around that you can pull in and consider that, and throw it out , and consider that and i didn’t have anything floating out here. not very much anyway,
I could look at it and make a guess but i could not-my brain couldn’t go enough levels deep to be able to get the information i needed from those colors in the pegs and the information that my daughter gave me, telling me which ones were the right color and the right space and so forth. i just couldn’t now it’s scary and unsettling and very inconvenient for daily life. i have
Been the one taking the kids to school and picking them up for over 10 years since they started school and i never forgot them until this last year when its happened twice, and fortunately, they’re old enough now to have cellphones. but to get the call, “you’re supposed to pick me up half an hour ago.” oh my god, how did i forget that? the same way i forget everything else.
So i know rely on my electronic calendar, the google calendar in my phone to notify me when there’s something coming up, and even that doesn’t work if i don’t enter the event right away because if i wait more than a couple of minutes after somebody calls me and tells do something. if i don’t do that entry as soon as i’m done with that call, i will forget and until they
Call me next week and say, “why weren’t you at the meeting?” i’ll have no idea that i miss that. what to do? well, in my case, i think i’m going to even cut out the 5mg a day and go off statins completely understanding that i may be taking other health risks but it will help restore some more of my mental function, i will gladly take that chance and it was actually
Earlier this year, about the time i started on statins that there was stories appearing in the news about this mental issues with people who took statins, and that there were all of this forgetfulness and short-term memory loss issues people were reporting, and then like a month or two after all of those reports came out, a big report came out saying, “no.” they said,
“Those studies were mistaken. there’s no problem at all with statins. we’ve done follow-ups with the people on statins and they after a while get used to it and they don’t have the effects anymore.” well i can explain that to you, when you first go on statin and after a week and you’re losing your mind, you go back to your doctor and say, “i can’t remember anything. i’m
Getting this weird mood stuff, what’s going on?” the doctor says, “well, we’ll switch you with a different one or this or that but stay on it, you really need it.” well, 6 months or a year later, they come back and the company – the pharmaceutical company – calls you and say, “oh, how are the statins? you having any of this forgetfulness issues or any of this?” i think,
“No.” because you don’t remember, because you’ve been on statins for a whole year and you’ve so blown away your memory that you don’t remember that when you started on them, you couldn’t remember so are statins good or bad? do they get a thumbs up? well, as doctors like to say, when they’re used as directed, used as intended. when they were originally developed, it was
To treat people who had that disorder where their bodies produced too much cholesterol. i’m sure they’re great for that and people who have that should be so thankful that this medicine has been developed. also maybe, for people who have very severe cardiovascular disease with all kinds of clogged- up arteries, this may be able to help them as well. i don’t know but what
The drug companies seem to think is this is something almost everybody can benefit from, and that’s where i this has been a semi-coherent rantings of a self-professed stupid person who lost their short-term memory on statins. i’d be curious to know your experience if you had taken statins. you feel fine, you haven’t noticed anything, people around you don’t tell you you’re
Acting strange? maybe i’m in the minority on this, the things is i just don’t trust the results and the surveys that the drug companies are doing to see whether this actually affects people a great deal the same way it’s affected me that it’s caused those mental issues. so as an unofficial survey, if you’d like to comment in the box down below this video, and let us know
Have you or anyone you know had this sort of confusion, forgetfulness issues with statins? now, you can call me crazy, but it won’t hurt my feelings because in a couple of minutes, i probably won’t remember you said it.
Transcribed from video
How Statins Made Me Stupid | EpicReviewGuys in 4k CC By EpicReviewGuys
