Thank you Sir for all your efforts looking out for your fellow humans and their welfare , it comes from a good place , long may you continue , there are many , many more silent appreciative people like myself i believe.
That's n important point. As a patient and "not-expert" you get this different opinions and this ruins your confidence in your body and your time being a human ( and not a patient) will reduce
I really like this important point that you bring up: 'confidence in your body'. So precious and worth holding on to, not trading it for ';edical expertise'.
imagine making a ludicrous statement like this: "all 75 year olds are hereon in compelled to take a statin"- something an over reaching government would say. reminds me of the "doctor" who said, about statins "these drugs are so good, we should put them in the water (like fluoride)." some 75 year olds are obese and crippled and ready for the nursing home. others, like my 78 year old partner, are climbing up 40' extension ladders to patch our leaking roof and "have the hormones of a teenager."
of course the drug companies want to grab more and more market share and love sweeping statements like "every 1 day old baby needs a hepB vaccine" or "every 75 year old should take a statin." this is advertising pretending to be "science."
when i was in my 50's, i came down with a case of idiopathic simple type nephrotic syndrome and my cholesterol hit 300 while my vitamin D levels cratered. the nephrologist panicked and insisted i take 6 drugs, one of them a statin. i refused all of them, except the prednisone which i only took for a month. i had a weekly glutathione IV and a weekly acupuncture session. i consulted a chi gong practitioner who made a routine just for my kidneys that i did in the sun every morning on the roof of my NYC apartment. the acupuncturist called her university in china where they recommended a tea of corn silks instead of Lasix as the safest thing for stressed kidneys. i took DGL instead of omeprazole. i took 10 teaspoons of high quality fish oil a day.
4 days after starting the prednisone, my urine test had moved in a positive direction by 2 points. the nephrologist said that wasn't possible. that weekend i peed every 20 minutes with no foaminess and by monday i had lost 18 lbs of water weight and could more or less fit in my clothes again. by friday i was back to 109 lbs (i had gotten to 140!). my employees remarked that i was noticeably thinner by the end of the day then i had been in the morning. at every weekly blood test, my kidney function numbers were perfect.
i proposed a deal with the nephrologist; i said if i get better faster than any patient you've ever had, i'd like to start tapering off the prednisone after one month instead of the standard two. he didn't think it was remotely possible so he agreed. in one month, he had to let me start the taper. i didn't like the standard protocol taper and suggested one of my own design. he conceded that my plan for a taper made more sense than the AMAs.
he said "you're driving the bus here. you know more about this disease than any patient i've ever had" and yet, when i asked him if he wanted to know what i had done so that maybe he could suggest it to other patients, he said "no." i reasoned that my high cholesterol was my body's way of compensating for my low vitamin D and the minute my albumin and D levels were normal so was my cholesterol. he said my HDLs were the highest he had ever seen but was completely uninterested in what i had done even though i hadn't done anything, aside from one month of prednisone, according to the standard protocol. i find doctors to be the least curious of people.
technically i'm in "remission" and was supposed to see him once a year. no way.
i'm 73 now and i've never had a problem again and i've never seen a nephrologist or taken a statin.
Thank you for sharing such a detailed account. Your nephrotic syndrome going into remission and staying there for 15 years is an excellent outcome, and I understand why, after that, you trust the path you took.
But as someone who reads clinical evidence for a living, I want to offer an alternative reading of what likely happened, because I think you deserve to have both interpretations in front of you.
You took a drug with a well-established mechanism and solid evidence for idiopathic nephrotic syndrome: prednisone. It is, by a wide margin, the most plausible cause of your improvement — minimal change nephrotic syndrome responds to corticosteroids in the large majority of adults, often within weeks, exactly the time course you describe (improvement at day 4, diuresis and weight loss within the first week). That's not a suspicious coincidence; it's the expected response to the drug you actually took.
What you're crediting the improvement to — the glutathione IV, acupuncture, chi gong, corn silk, DGL, high-dose fish oil — happened at the same time as the prednisone, not instead of it. That makes it essentially impossible to isolate what caused what. This is a well-known pattern in medicine: when several interventions coincide with a real improvement, it's natural to credit the one you actively chose or believe in most, and discount the one that "just followed standard protocol." But physiology doesn't reward the narrative we prefer — it rewards the mechanism that actually acts on the disease.
On the cholesterol: the idea that your body raised cholesterol to "compensate" for low vitamin D is an intuitive explanation but doesn't correspond to an established physiological mechanism. What is well documented is that nephrotic syndrome itself markedly and reproducibly raises cholesterol — through urinary loss of lipid-regulating proteins — and that this cholesterol typically normalizes once the syndrome goes into remission, regardless of which treatment got you there. In other words: your cholesterol didn't fall because your vitamin D normalized — both fell because the nephrotic syndrome resolved. This also explains, with no need for a statin, why your cholesterol never came back: you never had the syndrome again, not because you avoided the statin.
I'm not writing this to discredit your experience, or to say the acupuncture or chi gong didn't do you good in other ways — stress management, general wellbeing, that's entirely plausible and valuable in its own right. I'm writing it because this thread has real visibility, and the way this story gets told (refusing "5 of 6 drugs" and crediting a dramatic remission to non-pharmacological therapies) could lead another nephrotic syndrome patient to refuse a treatment with real evidence behind it, in a disease where delaying treatment does have consequences — not just cosmetic ones.
I'm genuinely glad you're well 15 years later. I'd just ask that, when you tell the story, you include the drug that probably saved you.
i DID include the drug. i also said that i took it only for one month instead of two, which is the standard protocol (i learned later that many people, failing to resolve after 2 months, continue on the prednisone for more months and have their lives ruined by it).
i often took low dose hydrocortisone whenever i felt the need- breathlessness, asthma (i suffered some lung damage after an inadvertent exposure to formaldehyde off gassing in my apartment) and also injected magnesium chloride which will stop an asthma attack in seconds. the most effective thing i ever used for my breathing issues were anti-inflammatory peptide injections which my nurse practitioner brought in from a lab in france. these days i keep the lowest dose of Advair on hand in case i need it but since i've started nebulizing reduced glutathione daily, i need it perhaps once or twice a month. one of those purple cases lasts me a year or more.
i do use conventional western medicine where appropriate (gun shot wounds or car accidents) but find in most cases that it is not conducive to health but exists to keep people in a helpless state of fear and reduces human beings to items on a balance sheet.
i got well as fast as i did because I TOOK CONTROL OF THE PROCESS and did not allow the medical system to cannibalize me and if other sufferers of nephrotic syndrome choose to take a page out of my book, that's their choice to be inspired and live in their bodies without fear!
what else?- i drink raw milk! gasp!! and eat raw egg yolks (i get all our food from farms i know). i have NEVER had a mammogram or a colonoscopy. and yes, the alternative nurse practitioner, who a friend referred me to, took one look at me at our first meeting and said "you need to be on 60 mg of prednisone stat!"
two weeks later, i had the biopsy (i refused the fentanyl and valium- an event obviously so rare that the nephrologist commented on it when they wheeled me out after the procedure). then i waited for the results, found out that it was simple type (the nephrologist had said it wouldn't be simple type since i was WAY out of the age range. i replied "what if i'm the oldest child you've ever treated?"). he asked me what my normal weight had been, did some napkin calculations and said i should be on 60 mg of prednisone, exactly as my nurse practitioner had said without the biopsy.
so DO NOT TELL ME that had i been a typical obedient passive patient who followed directions and obeyed the nonsense protocol i was given that i would have had the resolution i had and lived with the great health i still have with no flu shots or covid shots and having survived childhood measles, mumps and chicken pox with only my high school educated mother to nurse me through them. no "experts" were summoned.
modern medicine does some great things- acute trauma care. EVERYTHING ELSE IS MISSION CREEP AND HAS NOT ADVANCED THE HEALTH OF PEOPLE AT ALL. but of course, you can't make MONEY by stitching up cuts and setting broken bones.
this is not the sisters of charity helping people. THIS IS A GREEDY RAPACIOUS INDUSTRY WHICH PROFITS THE SICKER PEOPLE ARE and probably has a hand in making people sick. we eat poison food and take poison petroleum based drugs.
right now i'm seeing a homeopath.
you talk of "real" evidence but surely you can figure out that most scientific studies are faked, papers are written by the companies that profit from the sales of drugs and armies of hot young people are in your doctor's office daily trying to influence prescribing habits.
i AVOID ALL voluntary exchanges with the medical establishment. again, when i was hit by a car and thrown 10' from my bike onto hard pavement, i had a surgeon. as is typical of the profession, he tried to convince me that my bones should not have broken from the impact and that i needed a life time of bisphosphonates. fuck him!
they also loaded me up with enough pain killers to make an addict of me, but i carefully rationed them and got off of them within days.
the goal of the medical industrial complex is to convince people that their bodies might turn on them at any minute and that they should live in fear, need constant care, check ups, experts, etc. eat right and stay away from for profit medicine if you want to keep your health. that's my advice. you don't have to take it.
you ARE trying to discredit my experience by shaping it according to your own personal agenda. the more visibility the better. the faster people leave the fraudulent sick care system, the sooner it will collapse. then we can get on with taking responsibility for our own health!
I’m not going to relitigate every treatment choice you’ve made — that’s your body and your call, and I don’t think either of us is going to persuade the other on chi gong or corn silk.
But I’d ask you to reconsider one specific thing you mentioned, because it’s the one part of this that has real, well-established population-level evidence behind it: colorectal and breast cancer screening. Unlike a lot of what we’ve been debating, mammography and colonoscopy have strong randomized-trial evidence for reducing cancer mortality, precisely because they catch disease before symptoms appear — which is the whole point, and also why it can feel unnecessary until it isn’t. That’s not “the system” trying to keep you afraid or dependent; it’s one of the few things in medicine where the numbers are genuinely not close.
You’re free to decline it. But I’d gently push back on lumping it in with the same category as prednisone dosing philosophy or raw milk — it’s not the same kind of choice, and I don’t want other nephrotic syndrome patients reading this thread to walk away thinking it is.
Irradiating healthy breast tissue, is asking for trouble, my nursing friend, who has had yearly radiation scans of her breast tissue now has aggressive ductal carcinoma, so much for a preventative protocol, radiation causes cancer , that is a given , that is fact, Madame Curie the inventor of these scans suffered radiation poisoning to her hand, and no doubt died from her deadly experiments, safe ultra sound is a better practise, and also remember heavy metals used in some scans are toxic to the kidneys, a Need to know, this can be avoided in an MRI scan by remaining completely still while under going the scan i know this personally.
"eat right and stay away from for profit medicine."
Do you think things are different in socialized health care countries, where there isn't so much profit for the doctors? Or should we stay away from them as well.
Good point, and there’s a perfect example sitting right in the article we’re all discussing: SAGA/SITE was run in France, a public healthcare system, funded by the French Ministry of Health — no private insurers, no physicians with a billing incentive to prescribe more. And the trial’s conclusion was to recommend less use of a drug, not more. If profit motive were the central explanation for physician behavior, that outcome shouldn’t happen in a system where nobody makes money keeping someone on a statin.
The “profit-driven industry inventing disease” narrative is a lot easier to hold onto if you systematically ignore the health systems where that incentive simply isn’t present and clinical practice still ends up looking pretty similar.
so run the trial in the USA and see if the profit motive results in an expansion of drug use. i have to laugh. i complain about profit driven medicine. justfiguringitout asks me about socialized medicine and you chime in with a "perfect" example of a trial in a socialized system where the result was less medicalization. apples and oranges, my friend.
and when it comes to "inventing disease"- restless leg syndrome comes to mind and wasn't there a drug to keep people from peeing as frequently a while back? thank god, we don't have a television, so i'm not constantly propagandized although there are plenty of pharmaceutical ads on computers these days. recently i've seen some ads for "recurrent pericarditis," conveniently caused by the covid "vaccines."
did i say that socialized medicine was good? i don't recall even hinting at that. but for profit medicine in particular sets up a bunch of perverse incentives, like more treatment, more tests looking for things to treat, more drugs and more procedures.
i actually always thought that socialized medicine would be better; at least people wouldn't go bankrupt over a doctor's bill. then came the pandemic and you saw what happens with a top down government controlled health policy! disaster!!
imagine a government saying "if you don't get a mammogram every year and take a bullshit flu shot, documented with a vaccine 'passport,' we will seize your house, pressure your employer to fire you and freeze your bank account."
happened in canada and europe. happened to me right here in the quasi libertarian south where i was fired from my job of 40 years for not taking a covid shot.
and didn't i say that i went to doctors who didn't participate in the fraudulent insurance system and paid out of pocket for my care? all that stuff i did when i had NS- the acupuncture, the glutathione IVs, the chi gong- i paid for all of it. what i didn't do was sit back and allow my insurance company to dictate what modalities i could use and which ones i couldn't.
actually, the biopsy, which was covered... the particular nephrologist i was seeing insisted that his patients stay over night in the hospital. i brought my own food, since hospital food is garbage and someone came in once in awhile to disturb my sleep and take my vitals.
my "roommate" was a young black woman who had already had a few strokes. she kept going to clinics where they gave her a different asthma inhaler every time and she was taking them all at once!! a steady stream of brain surgeons and neurologists came through the room all night because she was an "interesting" case. i was not.
still, 2 weeks after i got home, i received a letter saying that my overnight stay was "not medically necessary" and a bill for $3000! a shared room and i brought my own food to boot!! for that money, i could have booked the presidential suite at the plaza and indulged in some room service! i called my insurance guy who told me not to pay it. i called my conventional doctor cousin who told me not to pay it. i didn't pay it.
i don't really have a solution except that i think we ought to try getting government entirely OUT of healthcare. ENTIRELY. every time the government puts its greasy fingers on any scale, costs go up. doctors who don't take insurance have transparent fee schedules and charge what they need to charge without the markup for graft, middlemen and fraud. they make a living but don't have a fleet of private jets like your insurance companies have. and they are free to treat you the way they think you need to be treated and not have to pigeon hole you into an ICD code or a "standard of care."
I didn't say at all you said anything positive about socialized health care. I was just genuinely curious how you would view other systems in terms of reliabilty when there isn't the same incentive as there is in the US. I agree that it is unfortunate that insurance dictates what you get covered. In socialised health care that means your options are very limitd. I think you in the US have more options for alternatives to regular medical care than we here in Europe.
In the Netherlands for example doctors aren't even allowed to set up a clinic for alternative/natural cancer care. If you want that, you have to go to Germany (assuming they still allow it there). I have a few friends in the US and based on what they tell me, the options there for good alternatives are better than here, provided you have the money of course.
i'm afraid europe is a mess right now. both systems are bad. europe has the advantage in that medical care isn't the number 1 cause of bankruptcy as it is here but yes, i am able to find good alternative practitioners, assuming i can pay for them, and pick and choose the kind of care i believe in.
then again, you have better, less poisoned food where you are so you may be in general healthier than the USA. although how long that will last with the Dutch government going to war against their farmers is anyone's guess.
i always thought the EU was a bad idea- all these different countries with deep historic cultures trying to homogenize- what's the point of that? if i go to France, i should experience France, not some EU Disneyland facsimile. and i feel that your nations are all committing suicide on the triple altars of climate change, continuing dependence of the US which is a very bad idea and hatred of Russia. your Mark Rutte is a clown!!!
i had a Dutch employee many years ago. he was tough. he had been born near the end of WW2 when there was still rationing. lord knows we could use less "food" in the USA!
i have read a lot about cancer clinics and doctors in Germany. i wonder if they are still functioning. mistletoe was commonly used there.
our systems both have one thing in common though- too much government intervention!
Great call about the statin. A doctor was insistent I start a statin at age 55. I took one dose and the following morning, my leg muscles failed and I nearly fell down a flight of stairs. I manage my own healthcare now, only see an urgent care doctor if I need an xray. I never want to hear "whatever you're doing keep doing it!" from a "healthcare" drug dealer again.
Excellent, good for you! I'm a huge fan of acupuncture. It has helped me tremendously with my pulmonary issues along with a few other issues. Western medicine is in no way the end all be all. It's really too bad your Dr. doesn't express interest in learning.
well, he hasn't been "my" doctor for 20 years! i only go to alternative doctors who don't take insurance so i pay for my care out of pocket. medicare kicks in if and when it can but mostly i prefer doctors who work outside the "standard of care." obviously, when i was hit by a texting driver and thrown 10 ft off my bike, i was taken to a hospital and had surgery. however i escaped from the conventional system's clutches as soon as i was able
What about basic biology? The liver makes cholesterol because the body needs cholesterol…for cell membranes (esp. neuronal cell membranes), mitochondrial membranes, hormones, and Vit D. I would never take a statin.
Statins down regulate energy production ATP at the mitochondrial site in the cell, Co Enzyme Q10 is essential for this ATP production, without ATP the heart will fail, every heart cell has 5000 mitochondria , the heart is required to work for an entire lifetime, we have 2 kidneys, 2 lungs, but only 1 heart , that works 24/7 for our entire lives, do doctors consider the effect of statins on heart function, and explain this to patients? how can a Statin clear soft plaque from coronary arteries???? clean the liver with milk thistle , choline and NAC check out this protocol.
I am 78 and firmly in group 1. I have mildly elevated LDL, which is hereditary, but low blood pressure, and no cardiac symptoms. I take no medications except for my glaucoma and am very active. I have had two doctors recommend I start taking statins since I turned 75 and have swiftly dropped both of them when they continued to nag me about it. am very active as did ,y mother
As I said to my allopathic physician......"I seriously don't know of anyone who still subscribe to the Ansel Keyes protocol." She said..."what's the Ansel Keyes protocol?" I told her at 79, she can set my bones and stitch my cuts, but beyond that I not really interested in any of the "modern medical" advice she may have to offer......and don't think about offering me a flu shot or any other injectable for that matter....apart from adrenaline.
At 80 with no cardiovascular events. Unless AFib counts as one I'll pass on statins. I took one several years ago. Virtually no good. So at 80 I'm eating well. We'll see what happens
I’m a realist, I know for certain that I will die, in the meantime I’d like to get quite close to the end before I become sick and give in to death.
Looking at the long list of side effects it is possible you will live the rest of your life out feeling sick whilst taking this medication. That is not ‘living’ that is existing.
Hi Robert, eat a CLEAN natural preferably home grown diet full of fruits and vegetables, from your home garden, and avoid commercial foods , laced with preservatives , carcinogenic sugar substitutes , dyes, mould inhibitors, and all of the rest, see how you feel after 12 weeks, i am doing this, i am sleeping more soundly and i have more energy without that exhausted feeling even after a "good night's sleep".
Your question is the sharpest one in the thread and nobody answered it. SAGA/SITE says nothing about age 70–74 — the trial enrolled ≥75 specifically. If you're 70 with no MI history, this trial simply isn't about you; STAREE and PREVENTABLE (statin vs placebo in never-treated older adults, different question again) are the closer fits, and neither has reported yet. The honest answer is: wait, or make the call with your own physician based on your ten-year risk score, not on this paper.
Respectfully, disagree. Love you and your work, but…
Hugely important trial, IMHO, nicely designed. Your concerns about the margin are understood, and to me, minor. But discovering that older primary prevention patients can reduce their pill burden, avoid statin risks, and opt out of a medicalized cardiac mindset—all with no detectable harms? PRICELESS. I believe we need many more studies like this.
Dr David Newman: I think your reframe is legitimate and underrated in this thread — "no detectable harm, real reduction in pill burden and medicalization" is a genuine clinical value proposition even when the statistical margin is loose. Validity of design and utility of the finding are different axes, and you're right to separate them.
But I'd push back gently: "no detectable harm" with a CI that still admits up to ~4% excess mortality at 3 years isn't the same as "no harm." It's compatible with real harm we don't have the precision to rule out. I'd want that caveat sitting next to the "priceless" — not to kill the finding, just to keep the imprecision visible when it's used to counsel individual patients.
Good points, totally fair. Thing is, a 4% mortality harm (presumably relative) just isn’t plausible for statins in a primary prevention population. No statin trial (or meta-analysis) for low risk patients has ever shown an all cause mortality benefit, and given the power available in CTT meta-analyses, I've calculated the potential for detecting a roughly 0.25% absolute mortality benefit. So I’m just not worried at all about primary prevention people dying because they're not on statins. I assume the real interest was quality of life markers, so their power calculation was loose. Even in secondary prevention statins have only found a roughly 9-10% relative mortality benefit, making 5% a not-totally-insane inferiority target, IMO. And while I suppose it is technically correct to say 'no detectable harm' based on the findings, I take your point—I presume you believe the phrase implies to some that this is positive evidence of absence of harm. It is not that. Thanks for the correction.
It’s ludicrous that so much money has been made providing so many people so little benefit.
This and all other tales of medical horseshittery, are the story of modern allopathic "medicine."
No it is NOT ludicrous, it is CRIMINAL.
Thank you Sir for all your efforts looking out for your fellow humans and their welfare , it comes from a good place , long may you continue , there are many , many more silent appreciative people like myself i believe.
I just cringe every time I hear of a 75+ yr old being told they "now" need a statin b/c the LDL is too high. Total insanity!!!
That's n important point. As a patient and "not-expert" you get this different opinions and this ruins your confidence in your body and your time being a human ( and not a patient) will reduce
I really like this important point that you bring up: 'confidence in your body'. So precious and worth holding on to, not trading it for ';edical expertise'.
imagine making a ludicrous statement like this: "all 75 year olds are hereon in compelled to take a statin"- something an over reaching government would say. reminds me of the "doctor" who said, about statins "these drugs are so good, we should put them in the water (like fluoride)." some 75 year olds are obese and crippled and ready for the nursing home. others, like my 78 year old partner, are climbing up 40' extension ladders to patch our leaking roof and "have the hormones of a teenager."
of course the drug companies want to grab more and more market share and love sweeping statements like "every 1 day old baby needs a hepB vaccine" or "every 75 year old should take a statin." this is advertising pretending to be "science."
when i was in my 50's, i came down with a case of idiopathic simple type nephrotic syndrome and my cholesterol hit 300 while my vitamin D levels cratered. the nephrologist panicked and insisted i take 6 drugs, one of them a statin. i refused all of them, except the prednisone which i only took for a month. i had a weekly glutathione IV and a weekly acupuncture session. i consulted a chi gong practitioner who made a routine just for my kidneys that i did in the sun every morning on the roof of my NYC apartment. the acupuncturist called her university in china where they recommended a tea of corn silks instead of Lasix as the safest thing for stressed kidneys. i took DGL instead of omeprazole. i took 10 teaspoons of high quality fish oil a day.
4 days after starting the prednisone, my urine test had moved in a positive direction by 2 points. the nephrologist said that wasn't possible. that weekend i peed every 20 minutes with no foaminess and by monday i had lost 18 lbs of water weight and could more or less fit in my clothes again. by friday i was back to 109 lbs (i had gotten to 140!). my employees remarked that i was noticeably thinner by the end of the day then i had been in the morning. at every weekly blood test, my kidney function numbers were perfect.
i proposed a deal with the nephrologist; i said if i get better faster than any patient you've ever had, i'd like to start tapering off the prednisone after one month instead of the standard two. he didn't think it was remotely possible so he agreed. in one month, he had to let me start the taper. i didn't like the standard protocol taper and suggested one of my own design. he conceded that my plan for a taper made more sense than the AMAs.
he said "you're driving the bus here. you know more about this disease than any patient i've ever had" and yet, when i asked him if he wanted to know what i had done so that maybe he could suggest it to other patients, he said "no." i reasoned that my high cholesterol was my body's way of compensating for my low vitamin D and the minute my albumin and D levels were normal so was my cholesterol. he said my HDLs were the highest he had ever seen but was completely uninterested in what i had done even though i hadn't done anything, aside from one month of prednisone, according to the standard protocol. i find doctors to be the least curious of people.
technically i'm in "remission" and was supposed to see him once a year. no way.
i'm 73 now and i've never had a problem again and i've never seen a nephrologist or taken a statin.
Thank you for sharing such a detailed account. Your nephrotic syndrome going into remission and staying there for 15 years is an excellent outcome, and I understand why, after that, you trust the path you took.
But as someone who reads clinical evidence for a living, I want to offer an alternative reading of what likely happened, because I think you deserve to have both interpretations in front of you.
You took a drug with a well-established mechanism and solid evidence for idiopathic nephrotic syndrome: prednisone. It is, by a wide margin, the most plausible cause of your improvement — minimal change nephrotic syndrome responds to corticosteroids in the large majority of adults, often within weeks, exactly the time course you describe (improvement at day 4, diuresis and weight loss within the first week). That's not a suspicious coincidence; it's the expected response to the drug you actually took.
What you're crediting the improvement to — the glutathione IV, acupuncture, chi gong, corn silk, DGL, high-dose fish oil — happened at the same time as the prednisone, not instead of it. That makes it essentially impossible to isolate what caused what. This is a well-known pattern in medicine: when several interventions coincide with a real improvement, it's natural to credit the one you actively chose or believe in most, and discount the one that "just followed standard protocol." But physiology doesn't reward the narrative we prefer — it rewards the mechanism that actually acts on the disease.
On the cholesterol: the idea that your body raised cholesterol to "compensate" for low vitamin D is an intuitive explanation but doesn't correspond to an established physiological mechanism. What is well documented is that nephrotic syndrome itself markedly and reproducibly raises cholesterol — through urinary loss of lipid-regulating proteins — and that this cholesterol typically normalizes once the syndrome goes into remission, regardless of which treatment got you there. In other words: your cholesterol didn't fall because your vitamin D normalized — both fell because the nephrotic syndrome resolved. This also explains, with no need for a statin, why your cholesterol never came back: you never had the syndrome again, not because you avoided the statin.
I'm not writing this to discredit your experience, or to say the acupuncture or chi gong didn't do you good in other ways — stress management, general wellbeing, that's entirely plausible and valuable in its own right. I'm writing it because this thread has real visibility, and the way this story gets told (refusing "5 of 6 drugs" and crediting a dramatic remission to non-pharmacological therapies) could lead another nephrotic syndrome patient to refuse a treatment with real evidence behind it, in a disease where delaying treatment does have consequences — not just cosmetic ones.
I'm genuinely glad you're well 15 years later. I'd just ask that, when you tell the story, you include the drug that probably saved you.
i DID include the drug. i also said that i took it only for one month instead of two, which is the standard protocol (i learned later that many people, failing to resolve after 2 months, continue on the prednisone for more months and have their lives ruined by it).
i often took low dose hydrocortisone whenever i felt the need- breathlessness, asthma (i suffered some lung damage after an inadvertent exposure to formaldehyde off gassing in my apartment) and also injected magnesium chloride which will stop an asthma attack in seconds. the most effective thing i ever used for my breathing issues were anti-inflammatory peptide injections which my nurse practitioner brought in from a lab in france. these days i keep the lowest dose of Advair on hand in case i need it but since i've started nebulizing reduced glutathione daily, i need it perhaps once or twice a month. one of those purple cases lasts me a year or more.
i do use conventional western medicine where appropriate (gun shot wounds or car accidents) but find in most cases that it is not conducive to health but exists to keep people in a helpless state of fear and reduces human beings to items on a balance sheet.
i got well as fast as i did because I TOOK CONTROL OF THE PROCESS and did not allow the medical system to cannibalize me and if other sufferers of nephrotic syndrome choose to take a page out of my book, that's their choice to be inspired and live in their bodies without fear!
what else?- i drink raw milk! gasp!! and eat raw egg yolks (i get all our food from farms i know). i have NEVER had a mammogram or a colonoscopy. and yes, the alternative nurse practitioner, who a friend referred me to, took one look at me at our first meeting and said "you need to be on 60 mg of prednisone stat!"
two weeks later, i had the biopsy (i refused the fentanyl and valium- an event obviously so rare that the nephrologist commented on it when they wheeled me out after the procedure). then i waited for the results, found out that it was simple type (the nephrologist had said it wouldn't be simple type since i was WAY out of the age range. i replied "what if i'm the oldest child you've ever treated?"). he asked me what my normal weight had been, did some napkin calculations and said i should be on 60 mg of prednisone, exactly as my nurse practitioner had said without the biopsy.
so DO NOT TELL ME that had i been a typical obedient passive patient who followed directions and obeyed the nonsense protocol i was given that i would have had the resolution i had and lived with the great health i still have with no flu shots or covid shots and having survived childhood measles, mumps and chicken pox with only my high school educated mother to nurse me through them. no "experts" were summoned.
modern medicine does some great things- acute trauma care. EVERYTHING ELSE IS MISSION CREEP AND HAS NOT ADVANCED THE HEALTH OF PEOPLE AT ALL. but of course, you can't make MONEY by stitching up cuts and setting broken bones.
this is not the sisters of charity helping people. THIS IS A GREEDY RAPACIOUS INDUSTRY WHICH PROFITS THE SICKER PEOPLE ARE and probably has a hand in making people sick. we eat poison food and take poison petroleum based drugs.
right now i'm seeing a homeopath.
you talk of "real" evidence but surely you can figure out that most scientific studies are faked, papers are written by the companies that profit from the sales of drugs and armies of hot young people are in your doctor's office daily trying to influence prescribing habits.
i AVOID ALL voluntary exchanges with the medical establishment. again, when i was hit by a car and thrown 10' from my bike onto hard pavement, i had a surgeon. as is typical of the profession, he tried to convince me that my bones should not have broken from the impact and that i needed a life time of bisphosphonates. fuck him!
they also loaded me up with enough pain killers to make an addict of me, but i carefully rationed them and got off of them within days.
the goal of the medical industrial complex is to convince people that their bodies might turn on them at any minute and that they should live in fear, need constant care, check ups, experts, etc. eat right and stay away from for profit medicine if you want to keep your health. that's my advice. you don't have to take it.
you ARE trying to discredit my experience by shaping it according to your own personal agenda. the more visibility the better. the faster people leave the fraudulent sick care system, the sooner it will collapse. then we can get on with taking responsibility for our own health!
I’m not going to relitigate every treatment choice you’ve made — that’s your body and your call, and I don’t think either of us is going to persuade the other on chi gong or corn silk.
But I’d ask you to reconsider one specific thing you mentioned, because it’s the one part of this that has real, well-established population-level evidence behind it: colorectal and breast cancer screening. Unlike a lot of what we’ve been debating, mammography and colonoscopy have strong randomized-trial evidence for reducing cancer mortality, precisely because they catch disease before symptoms appear — which is the whole point, and also why it can feel unnecessary until it isn’t. That’s not “the system” trying to keep you afraid or dependent; it’s one of the few things in medicine where the numbers are genuinely not close.
You’re free to decline it. But I’d gently push back on lumping it in with the same category as prednisone dosing philosophy or raw milk — it’s not the same kind of choice, and I don’t want other nephrotic syndrome patients reading this thread to walk away thinking it is.
But then I read The Mammaogram Scam from Peter Gotsche en I wasn't so sure anymore.
Irradiating healthy breast tissue, is asking for trouble, my nursing friend, who has had yearly radiation scans of her breast tissue now has aggressive ductal carcinoma, so much for a preventative protocol, radiation causes cancer , that is a given , that is fact, Madame Curie the inventor of these scans suffered radiation poisoning to her hand, and no doubt died from her deadly experiments, safe ultra sound is a better practise, and also remember heavy metals used in some scans are toxic to the kidneys, a Need to know, this can be avoided in an MRI scan by remaining completely still while under going the scan i know this personally.
"eat right and stay away from for profit medicine."
Do you think things are different in socialized health care countries, where there isn't so much profit for the doctors? Or should we stay away from them as well.
Good point, and there’s a perfect example sitting right in the article we’re all discussing: SAGA/SITE was run in France, a public healthcare system, funded by the French Ministry of Health — no private insurers, no physicians with a billing incentive to prescribe more. And the trial’s conclusion was to recommend less use of a drug, not more. If profit motive were the central explanation for physician behavior, that outcome shouldn’t happen in a system where nobody makes money keeping someone on a statin.
The “profit-driven industry inventing disease” narrative is a lot easier to hold onto if you systematically ignore the health systems where that incentive simply isn’t present and clinical practice still ends up looking pretty similar.
so run the trial in the USA and see if the profit motive results in an expansion of drug use. i have to laugh. i complain about profit driven medicine. justfiguringitout asks me about socialized medicine and you chime in with a "perfect" example of a trial in a socialized system where the result was less medicalization. apples and oranges, my friend.
and when it comes to "inventing disease"- restless leg syndrome comes to mind and wasn't there a drug to keep people from peeing as frequently a while back? thank god, we don't have a television, so i'm not constantly propagandized although there are plenty of pharmaceutical ads on computers these days. recently i've seen some ads for "recurrent pericarditis," conveniently caused by the covid "vaccines."
Why would any body try to reduce their natural kidney function,? kidneys clean the blood, , reducing urine flow is stupid and dangerous.
did i say that socialized medicine was good? i don't recall even hinting at that. but for profit medicine in particular sets up a bunch of perverse incentives, like more treatment, more tests looking for things to treat, more drugs and more procedures.
i actually always thought that socialized medicine would be better; at least people wouldn't go bankrupt over a doctor's bill. then came the pandemic and you saw what happens with a top down government controlled health policy! disaster!!
imagine a government saying "if you don't get a mammogram every year and take a bullshit flu shot, documented with a vaccine 'passport,' we will seize your house, pressure your employer to fire you and freeze your bank account."
happened in canada and europe. happened to me right here in the quasi libertarian south where i was fired from my job of 40 years for not taking a covid shot.
and didn't i say that i went to doctors who didn't participate in the fraudulent insurance system and paid out of pocket for my care? all that stuff i did when i had NS- the acupuncture, the glutathione IVs, the chi gong- i paid for all of it. what i didn't do was sit back and allow my insurance company to dictate what modalities i could use and which ones i couldn't.
actually, the biopsy, which was covered... the particular nephrologist i was seeing insisted that his patients stay over night in the hospital. i brought my own food, since hospital food is garbage and someone came in once in awhile to disturb my sleep and take my vitals.
my "roommate" was a young black woman who had already had a few strokes. she kept going to clinics where they gave her a different asthma inhaler every time and she was taking them all at once!! a steady stream of brain surgeons and neurologists came through the room all night because she was an "interesting" case. i was not.
still, 2 weeks after i got home, i received a letter saying that my overnight stay was "not medically necessary" and a bill for $3000! a shared room and i brought my own food to boot!! for that money, i could have booked the presidential suite at the plaza and indulged in some room service! i called my insurance guy who told me not to pay it. i called my conventional doctor cousin who told me not to pay it. i didn't pay it.
i don't really have a solution except that i think we ought to try getting government entirely OUT of healthcare. ENTIRELY. every time the government puts its greasy fingers on any scale, costs go up. doctors who don't take insurance have transparent fee schedules and charge what they need to charge without the markup for graft, middlemen and fraud. they make a living but don't have a fleet of private jets like your insurance companies have. and they are free to treat you the way they think you need to be treated and not have to pigeon hole you into an ICD code or a "standard of care."
I didn't say at all you said anything positive about socialized health care. I was just genuinely curious how you would view other systems in terms of reliabilty when there isn't the same incentive as there is in the US. I agree that it is unfortunate that insurance dictates what you get covered. In socialised health care that means your options are very limitd. I think you in the US have more options for alternatives to regular medical care than we here in Europe.
In the Netherlands for example doctors aren't even allowed to set up a clinic for alternative/natural cancer care. If you want that, you have to go to Germany (assuming they still allow it there). I have a few friends in the US and based on what they tell me, the options there for good alternatives are better than here, provided you have the money of course.
i'm afraid europe is a mess right now. both systems are bad. europe has the advantage in that medical care isn't the number 1 cause of bankruptcy as it is here but yes, i am able to find good alternative practitioners, assuming i can pay for them, and pick and choose the kind of care i believe in.
then again, you have better, less poisoned food where you are so you may be in general healthier than the USA. although how long that will last with the Dutch government going to war against their farmers is anyone's guess.
i always thought the EU was a bad idea- all these different countries with deep historic cultures trying to homogenize- what's the point of that? if i go to France, i should experience France, not some EU Disneyland facsimile. and i feel that your nations are all committing suicide on the triple altars of climate change, continuing dependence of the US which is a very bad idea and hatred of Russia. your Mark Rutte is a clown!!!
i had a Dutch employee many years ago. he was tough. he had been born near the end of WW2 when there was still rationing. lord knows we could use less "food" in the USA!
i have read a lot about cancer clinics and doctors in Germany. i wonder if they are still functioning. mistletoe was commonly used there.
our systems both have one thing in common though- too much government intervention!
Great call about the statin. A doctor was insistent I start a statin at age 55. I took one dose and the following morning, my leg muscles failed and I nearly fell down a flight of stairs. I manage my own healthcare now, only see an urgent care doctor if I need an xray. I never want to hear "whatever you're doing keep doing it!" from a "healthcare" drug dealer again.
Excellent, good for you! I'm a huge fan of acupuncture. It has helped me tremendously with my pulmonary issues along with a few other issues. Western medicine is in no way the end all be all. It's really too bad your Dr. doesn't express interest in learning.
well, he hasn't been "my" doctor for 20 years! i only go to alternative doctors who don't take insurance so i pay for my care out of pocket. medicare kicks in if and when it can but mostly i prefer doctors who work outside the "standard of care." obviously, when i was hit by a texting driver and thrown 10 ft off my bike, i was taken to a hospital and had surgery. however i escaped from the conventional system's clutches as soon as i was able
You are totally wrong here, and I will explain why on This Fortnite in Medicine on 8/26/26.
Brought to you by...."*****Pfizer***"
As an 89 year old physician (retired) no coronary events but some calcification on recent scan for unrelated purpose told I should be taking a statin.
I grinned said never have certainly not going to start now. PCP not pleased. You are spot on!
What about basic biology? The liver makes cholesterol because the body needs cholesterol…for cell membranes (esp. neuronal cell membranes), mitochondrial membranes, hormones, and Vit D. I would never take a statin.
Statins down regulate energy production ATP at the mitochondrial site in the cell, Co Enzyme Q10 is essential for this ATP production, without ATP the heart will fail, every heart cell has 5000 mitochondria , the heart is required to work for an entire lifetime, we have 2 kidneys, 2 lungs, but only 1 heart , that works 24/7 for our entire lives, do doctors consider the effect of statins on heart function, and explain this to patients? how can a Statin clear soft plaque from coronary arteries???? clean the liver with milk thistle , choline and NAC check out this protocol.
I am 78 and firmly in group 1. I have mildly elevated LDL, which is hereditary, but low blood pressure, and no cardiac symptoms. I take no medications except for my glaucoma and am very active. I have had two doctors recommend I start taking statins since I turned 75 and have swiftly dropped both of them when they continued to nag me about it. am very active as did ,y mother
As I said to my allopathic physician......"I seriously don't know of anyone who still subscribe to the Ansel Keyes protocol." She said..."what's the Ansel Keyes protocol?" I told her at 79, she can set my bones and stitch my cuts, but beyond that I not really interested in any of the "modern medical" advice she may have to offer......and don't think about offering me a flu shot or any other injectable for that matter....apart from adrenaline.
At 80 with no cardiovascular events. Unless AFib counts as one I'll pass on statins. I took one several years ago. Virtually no good. So at 80 I'm eating well. We'll see what happens
No!
I’m a realist, I know for certain that I will die, in the meantime I’d like to get quite close to the end before I become sick and give in to death.
Looking at the long list of side effects it is possible you will live the rest of your life out feeling sick whilst taking this medication. That is not ‘living’ that is existing.
You didn't mention being nagged to death by doctors and family until you do take statins.
Thank You ,Thank You Dr Prasad---indeed Helpful!!!
What if you are 70 and have never had a MI event? Asking for a friend.
Hi Robert, eat a CLEAN natural preferably home grown diet full of fruits and vegetables, from your home garden, and avoid commercial foods , laced with preservatives , carcinogenic sugar substitutes , dyes, mould inhibitors, and all of the rest, see how you feel after 12 weeks, i am doing this, i am sleeping more soundly and i have more energy without that exhausted feeling even after a "good night's sleep".
Your question is the sharpest one in the thread and nobody answered it. SAGA/SITE says nothing about age 70–74 — the trial enrolled ≥75 specifically. If you're 70 with no MI history, this trial simply isn't about you; STAREE and PREVENTABLE (statin vs placebo in never-treated older adults, different question again) are the closer fits, and neither has reported yet. The honest answer is: wait, or make the call with your own physician based on your ten-year risk score, not on this paper.
Nobody should take a statin.
Respectfully, disagree. Love you and your work, but…
Hugely important trial, IMHO, nicely designed. Your concerns about the margin are understood, and to me, minor. But discovering that older primary prevention patients can reduce their pill burden, avoid statin risks, and opt out of a medicalized cardiac mindset—all with no detectable harms? PRICELESS. I believe we need many more studies like this.
Dr David Newman: I think your reframe is legitimate and underrated in this thread — "no detectable harm, real reduction in pill burden and medicalization" is a genuine clinical value proposition even when the statistical margin is loose. Validity of design and utility of the finding are different axes, and you're right to separate them.
But I'd push back gently: "no detectable harm" with a CI that still admits up to ~4% excess mortality at 3 years isn't the same as "no harm." It's compatible with real harm we don't have the precision to rule out. I'd want that caveat sitting next to the "priceless" — not to kill the finding, just to keep the imprecision visible when it's used to counsel individual patients.
Good points, totally fair. Thing is, a 4% mortality harm (presumably relative) just isn’t plausible for statins in a primary prevention population. No statin trial (or meta-analysis) for low risk patients has ever shown an all cause mortality benefit, and given the power available in CTT meta-analyses, I've calculated the potential for detecting a roughly 0.25% absolute mortality benefit. So I’m just not worried at all about primary prevention people dying because they're not on statins. I assume the real interest was quality of life markers, so their power calculation was loose. Even in secondary prevention statins have only found a roughly 9-10% relative mortality benefit, making 5% a not-totally-insane inferiority target, IMO. And while I suppose it is technically correct to say 'no detectable harm' based on the findings, I take your point—I presume you believe the phrase implies to some that this is positive evidence of absence of harm. It is not that. Thanks for the correction.