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You have it backwards.  It is not incumbent on those who question a drug's efficacy to conduct studies showing why it is not effective.  On the contrary, those who propose a drug therapy have the obligation to defend it by providing sound studies demonstrating statistically significant benefit (because all drugs have side effects).  Those who promote statins have never satisfactorily done that.  And they are the ones who cherry-pick the studies to support the results they seek.  If you actually read the studies they offer in support of statin therapy and drill down into the data (as opposed to accepting at face value the abstracts where the authors of the study say what has been proved), you would see that what Guided_by_Voices and I have said in our previous posts is correct: reliable double-blind placebo-controlled primary prevention studies (i.e., using subjects who have not had a heart attack but simply have elevated lipid levels) of significant size have not been able to reliably demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in all-cause mortality from the use of statins.  Statins unquestionably lower total cholesterol and LDL.  Since that lowering does not produce a statistically significant reduction in all-cause mortality in primary prevention, it must follow that such elevated serum lipoprotein levels, in and of themselves, do not increase mortality risk.  They may be a marker of disease (and I'm not even so certain of that), but not a cause.  This is another way of saying correlation does not prove causation (although lack of correlation does prove lack of causation).


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