Cathy Meehan: Today we have another edition of the Meehan Mission Podcast. I’m your host, Cathy Meehan, and we have the honor of talking to Dr. David Brownstein. He is out of the state of Michigan—Go Wolverines, like he will say! He is a holistic integrative provider who is one of the rarities in the medical community because he is a critical thinker. Now, Dr. Brownstein has authored over 17 books. We’ve covered a couple of his topics, and today we are covering his book, The Statin Disaster. So, sit back, take some notes, and enjoy the podcast.
Welcome to another edition of the Meehan Mission Podcast. I’m your host, Cathy Meehan, and today my special guest is the wonderful, brilliant Dr. David Brownstein. And Dr. Brownstein, I am just so flattered that you like to come on our show and help educate our audience because you are full of a wealth of knowledge. And really, what I wanted to talk about today so that we get to the point is your book, The Statin Disaster. I will make sure that we have links to this in our description and everything, but I really wanted your take on what is going on in the medical world when it comes to statins. And not only that, we might even have to back that up a little bit: why are physicians even actually prescribing statins? So, can you just take it from there?
Dr. David Brownstein: I’m happy to be here. So, I write my books—I’ve written 17 books—for one of two reasons: either I’m annoyed about something or I’m excited about something. And that statin book was an annoyance book. Once I started looking at physiology and biochemistry, and looking at the pathway of where statins work in the human body and seeing the enzyme that they blocked—which is called HMG-CoA reductase—and seeing downstream what happens when you block that enzyme, there’s just no way on this earth that we were properly designed by our Maker to block that enzyme and expect a good long-term result. It’s just literally impossible because statins work by poisoning that enzyme, HMG-CoA reductase, and it’s the rate-limiting enzyme for making cholesterol. So if your goal is to lower cholesterol, statins are the perfect thing to do that, because they do that. However, downstream from cholesterol are all the adrenal hormones and sex hormones such as DHEA, pregnenolone, progesterone, estrogen, and testosterone.
I got started in holistic medicine 30 or 35 years ago from treating my dad, who was suffering from severe heart disease. He had a first heart attack at 40, a second heart attack at 42. He had a couple of angioplasties and bypass surgeries over the next 20 years. When I finished my residency, my dad was suffering from continuing angina for 20 years, popping nitroglycerin pills like they were candies, and he looked pale and pasty; he was going to die at any moment. I was just waiting for the phone call. So, I was practicing conventional medicine. I didn’t know anything holistically, and I wasn’t interested in anything holistically. I used to tell people, “Don’t take anything that I wasn’t taught in med school,” which, of course, the only things I was taught in med school were drugs, how to diagnose pathology, and how to prescribe a drug to treat that.
So, here I was out of medical school and out of residency, waiting for the phone call that my dad died. I was about six months into practice. I went into medicine to be a conventional family doctor. I didn’t grow up in a household taking anything alternative. We didn’t take a vitamin and we didn’t question anything in medicine. We went to the doctor when we were sick, took whatever they told us to take, and that was how I grew up. I started practicing medicine that way. And around six months into that, all of a sudden, I get this anxiety bubbling up out of nowhere. I lose sleep for a couple of nights, and I’m getting ready to go to work and I blurt out to my wife, Allison, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” We met at orientation at the University of Michigan—the winningest college football team—and I had no Plan B from when I met her. Plan A was to be a family doctor, and there was no backup.
I blurted out to her, “I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” I’d never said anything like this before. I was happy through the clinical part of med school. She said, “What’s wrong?” Remember at that time, we had $100,000 in student loans—and that was 35 years ago. I said, “I’m not helping people. I’m just prescribing drugs to treat symptoms—not treating the underlying cause—and then more drugs to treat the problems caused by the first drugs.” She said, “What are you going to do about it?” I said, “I don’t know.”
The short version of the story was I met this chiropractor as a referral from a patient. Before that, I never referred to them; I used to tell people don’t go to them because I thought they were dangerous, even though I didn’t know what they did. But the chiropractor that I met was Dr. Robert Radtke. He was doing functional biochemistry and looking at these biochemical pathways to see what inhibits them, what stimulates them, or what supports them—with the idea that if we support human biochemistry, the body is pretty well designed to take care of itself through an entire lifetime, including old age.
So, it was a new way of thinking. He brought me a book, Healing with Nutrition by Jonathan Wright, an allopathic physician. I read that book until the middle of the night. I woke up the next morning—I still hadn’t slept—but I was excited now. I called my dad and I said, “Hey, I want to do two blood tests on you.” I checked his thyroid levels and his testosterone levels based on what I read. My dad was on 12 medications to control diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, and heart disease. He looked awful. So, I draw those blood tests, and his testosterone levels come back below detectable limits. His thyroid levels come back in the lower part of the reference range. I put him on two things: natural thyroid hormone and natural testosterone.
Within seven days, his angina went away, which had been continual for 20 years. He started to look better and act better. He didn’t have chest pain anymore; he could start to do things. Within 30 days, his cholesterol fell below 200 without changing any of his bad habits. I quickly got him off his medications. This was before statins; there were other cholesterol medications then. His cholesterol stayed below 200 even though my dad ate terribly. It’s because we balanced his hormonal system. I ended up looking at that biochemical pathway of cholesterol and the downstream metabolites—including DHEA, pregnenolone, testosterone, and progesterone. My dad’s cholesterol came down because we opened up the bottleneck. His body was funneling cholesterol to try and make those hormones, but he was lacking thyroid hormone, vitamin A, B vitamins, and iodine, which are crucial to making them. Once I got him biochemically resettled, his cholesterol never went above 200 again. He lived out his life without chest pain. When I saw those changes in my dad in that first 30 days, I decided I’m going to do holistic medicine.
I decided every patient is going to get a hormonal and nutritional evaluation—a full thyroid and adrenal evaluation just like I did for my dad. I started diagnosing all these people with hormonal and thyroid imbalances and treating them with small amounts of hormones. Then statins come on the market.
Cathy Meehan: A huge market, isn’t it? Now, I’ve heard statins are a “miracle drug,” right? And that’s why it’s one of the most profitable for Big Pharma—we’re talking in the billions of dollars.
Dr. David Brownstein: It is the most profitable drug class in the history of Big Pharma. Over 40% of American adults are on statins right now, and I think the drug should be banned. I don’t think anyone should be on them. Cholesterol is a necessary substance for the human body. It has anti-inflammatory effects, it protects nervous tissue, and it has antibacterial and antiviral effects. So why would you want to poison the enzyme making this crucial substance?
I see these statin ads come out. The big ad in the 1990s was by Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the artificial heart. He was a dentist, and his picture was on these ads saying Lipitor lowers the risk of heart disease by 36%. Heart disease has been our number one killer for 75 years, and it is still our number one killer even though 40% of adults are taking the medication that supposedly treats it. It treats a surrogate marker—cholesterol—but it doesn’t treat heart disease very well. I asked myself, how does Lipitor lower the risk of heart disease by 36%? It can’t. I have the ad and the study in my book. When I lecture to doctors, I take my time and go through this study to show them how they did this and how they still do it today.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. How did they manipulate the numbers to show what they wanted to show, really?
Dr. David Brownstein: To get into med school, you have to take statistics. I got an A at the University of Michigan—4-0 against Ohio State, soon to be 5-0! I went to med school at Wayne State University in Detroit and took the same stats class. I got an A. I’m generally pretty good with numbers. But what I realize now is that when reviewing articles in residency, nobody knew how to read an article. I can tell you now that 99% of doctors don’t know how to read articles because they’re innumerate with statistics. They don’t know how to look at statistics, see what Big Pharma is doing, and come up with their own numbers to evaluate whether the drug is actually effective or safe.
So, that 36% was sticking in my craw. The study was in JAMA, a very reputable journal. I had two A’s in statistics, and I couldn’t figure it out. So, I buy a book, Statistics for Dummies, and I start looking. I stared at that article for about 30 days until I got my “aha” moment. My “aha” moment was that the drug companies used this term called “relative risk.” The 36% number was a relative risk. They used the same numbers for the COVID vaccines when they said “95% reduction” in COVID. Relative risk is a statistical term utilized by Big Pharma to make a poorly performing drug or therapy look better than it actually is.
If we have 100 people taking Drug X, which is supposed to lower heart attacks, and 100 people taking a placebo: if two people in the placebo group get a heart attack (2%) and one person in the Drug X group gets a heart attack (1%), the “relative risk” is 1% over 2%, which is 0.5. The media headlines then read “50% reduction in heart attacks” because one is half of two.
Cathy Meehan: The pharmaceutical industry is relying on the fact that physicians don’t know how to read medical literature. That’s where you are a critical thinker. If anybody presented a study to my husband, Jim, he went through it—who is it written by, what type of financial bias do they have? There’s not enough critical thinkers in the medical community.
Dr. David Brownstein: I agree. 99% of physicians are innumerate. They buy into this “95% benefit” of the Pfizer trial, thinking they have a 95% chance of not getting it, which is not true; it was actually 0.8%.
So, back to the Drug X example. If we do the same study with a million people in each group, and two get a heart attack in the placebo and one gets it in the drug group, the headlines still read “50% reduction.” However, the absolute difference in risk is 2% minus 1%, which is only a 1% difference. That means you have to treat 100 people to get that benefit for one person. 99% of people failed to benefit from the drug. If it’s one out of 10,000, it’s a 99.99% failure rate.
The FDA actually says doctors should not be relying on relative risk numbers to describe therapies to patients because it inordinately makes a poorly performing drug look better than it actually is. Doctors should rely on absolute risk differences and “number needed to treat” (NNT). So, going back to that Lipitor study: 3% in the placebo group got a heart attack, and 2% in the Lipitor group got one. Two over three is 66%, and if you subtract that from one, you get roughly 34%. They rounded up to 36%. However, the absolute risk difference is still only 1%. You have to treat 100 people for 3.3 years to prevent one heart attack.
Here we are 30 years later, and there is not a statin study that shows better than a 1% absolute reduction in non-fatal heart attacks for primary prevention—meaning a healthy person trying to prevent their first one. But patients are told they have a “30 to 50% reduction” because doctors are using relative risk.
Cathy Meehan: I see why you wrote this book. It’s infuriating.
Dr. David Brownstein: It is. Statins are given for primary prevention (no previous event) and secondary prevention (trying to prevent a repeat event). In every study for primary prevention, they are about 1% effective over three to five years. For secondary prevention, they’re about 3% effective. That means they are 97% to 99% ineffective. You might say, “I’ll take the 1% benefit.” Fine, but at least now you know the numbers. If vitamin C had a 1% benefit, what are the side effects? Maybe diarrhea if you take too much. But statins? Muscle aches, liver problems, neurologic problems—Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia have all been associated with long-term statin use. Those are a big deal for a 1% to 3% benefit.
Cathy Meehan: I’ve seen the list: damage to muscle fibers, brain damage, amnesia. Patients are prescribed statins and they’re not told the whole story.
Dr. David Brownstein: And they aren’t given talk on diet, exercise, or hormonal balance. Like in my dad’s case, the cholesterol was up because the “funnel” was plugged up by a lack of thyroid hormone and iodine. Once you open the funnel, cholesterol comes down naturally.
When med students rotate with me, I give them a research article. There was a 2002 article that claimed a 50% reduction in strokes. I calculate that 50% relative risk was actually an 0.8% absolute risk. In over 30 years of doing this, only one student got it right the first time. They all read the abstract and say “50% effective.” I spend the next 30 days teaching them how to calculate relative risk, absolute risk, and NNT on their own.
I had one med student who finally had the light click on. She realized it wasn’t 50%, it was 0.8%. She said to me, “I just wasted four years of my life. I don’t want to be a doctor anymore.” I told her, “Wait a minute! Medicine is a calling. Whether you practice holistic or conventional, you just need to be able to read these studies so you can tell your patients the real benefits and risks.” I wrote a blog post called “I Talked the Medical Student Off the Cliff.”
I got a private email from a local cardiologist who builds himself as a “holistic cardiologist.” He told me I was wrong. We went back and forth ten times. I sent him the FDA guidelines on relative risk and spelled out every calculation. By the 10th email, he said, “I give up. You’re right. It’s 1% effective. I’m willing to hope my patients are in that 1% category.” At least now he can tell his patients there’s a 1% chance it helps and a 99% chance it doesn’t, while potentially poisoning the brain. Who is going to take the drug when you tell them that?
Cathy Meehan: That’s the corruption in the pharmaceutical world. I was a drug rep, and I would go to offices with a little slick that said, “Here’s the study, prescribe this.” We didn’t want critical thinkers.
Dr. David Brownstein: It’s funny, drug reps stopped coming to me immediately once I started asking, “Are those absolute risk numbers or relative risk numbers?” They don’t want to talk about that.
We need to go back to basic nutrition and detoxification. Mercury, aluminum, and lead poison enzymes. One of the body’s defense mechanisms is to produce more cholesterol as a buffering effect to protect the central nervous system. The worst thing you can do is block that production. You need to find the underlying cause. Is it a crappy diet? Is it heavy metals? Is it a lack of thyroid hormone? Lack of thyroid hormone and elevated cholesterol has been written about for over a hundred years, yet cardiologists are too busy prescribing statins or PCSK9 inhibitors that totally deplete the system.
It’s the same with the Pfizer “95% effective” claim. Hospitalization and death didn’t change; it meant a 0.8% less chance of getting a mild case of COVID over a few months before it wore off. But we got 70% of the country vaccinated with a gene-modifying therapy, and I’ve seen what happens—it ain’t pretty. Doctors let Big Pharma bamboozle them because they are innumerate with statistics.
Cathy Meehan: What should a patient do when a specialist cardiologist says, “You’re going to be on a statin for the rest of your life”?
Dr. David Brownstein: My suggestion is: number one, educate yourself. That’s why I wrote the book. Present the data and the 1% to 3% benefit vs. the side effects, and let the patient decide. Conventional medicine uses fear: “If you don’t do this, you’re going to die a terrible death.” The antidote for that fear is education. Once you realize it isn’t 95% or 36%, but 0.8% or 1%, you can ask, “Am I going to take this when I look at these side effects?”
Cathy Meehan: Knowledge is power. We often recommend that parents don’t go into a pediatrician’s office alone because of the intimidation. I’d say the same for a cardiologist’s office. Arm yourself with knowledge and bring a support person. The “white coat” might be less aggressive when you ask about actual risk and adverse events.
Dr. David Brownstein: That’s really sage advice. I’m going to start suggesting that. Doctors aren’t bad people; they just can’t read an article to properly do their job. Discussion in medicine is how we move forward. You need a healthcare team that is on your side. People don’t have time to calculate NNT and absolute risk, but I wrote that book so people can understand it. Human biochemistry doesn’t change; if you poison that enzyme, there are consequences.
We take more drugs and vaccines than any people on earth, but are we the healthiest? No, we’re the worst of all Western countries. It’s time to educate yourself and find advocates.
Cathy Meehan: Power in numbers! Is there any last general advice when it comes to patients’ health or looking at cholesterol numbers?
Dr. David Brownstein: Start with someone who is on your side. When I’m with a patient, I don’t have my phone or a computer between us. It should be just eyes looking at each other with full concentration. Don’t settle for subpar health. If your healthcare person isn’t on the same page, search around. Holistic doctors are out there. Profit margins drive Big Pharma, but you don’t have to be a part of that.
Cathy Meehan: I love it, Dr. Brownstein. Thank you so much for this wealth of information. Please share this podcast, especially with people you know on statins. The more knowledge we have, the healthier we’re going to be. Everybody, take care. Thank you.
