I don’t have an educated opinion about this class of drugs, and I haven’t read the first part of this series, but most of it sounds about right to me. Mixing for-profit economic models and health care lead to things on the ’market’ of people’s health needs that aren’t actually needed. That’s consumerism, baby! Anyway, this is the part that caught my eye:

Finally — and here is the stunner — it turns out we don’t have any clear evidence that statins help the first group by lowering cholesterol levels. It’s true that they do lower cholesterol, but many researchers are no longer convinced that this is what helps patients avoid a second heart attack. It now seems likely that they work by reducing inflammation. In other words, these very expensive drugs seem to do the same thing that aspirin does. (Are they more effective than the humble aspirin? We’ll need head-to-head studies to find out.)

So I have two questions:  Read more