Stephen Colbert: Cheating Death With Crestor
13 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // November 15th, 2008 // 10:10 am
In case you missed the latest sardonic insights from Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, the other night he offered some important medicinal tips on women’s health and cholesterol that were sponsored by Prescott Pharmaceuticals. (Doctor of Fine Arts sounds like a legitimate qualification to be discussing your health, does it not?)
Colbert, who crushes statins on his bacon-chili-cheese corn dogs, tells us the Jupiter trial for AstraZeneca’s Crestor “is a great breakthrough in the battle to find things to prescribe to people who don’t need them…True, the drug costs $100 a month, but that is a small price to pay to not have the heart attack that there’s no way of knowing that you would have had.”
Still worried? Take VaxaCrest, which eliminates your concerns about taking Crestor for no reason by dramatically increasing your cholesterol count until your heart is pumping liquid nacho cheese.
And don’t forget that GynoMorph can solve a woman’s hormonal problems with…more hormones. You can take hormones when you can’t have babies. Then, when you want to have babies, you can take different hormones. Then, when your body can’t have babies anymore, you can take other hormones to make your body feel like it did when you could have babies, but didn’t - because you were taking hormones. GynoMorph is a hormone (not ho’mone) that will gradually turn you into…a dude.
Thanks to the WSJ health blog
Condor
H I L A R I O U S!
I will — of course — shamelessly boost it for mine, too!
[Confidential Side Note to Nathan and Atlex:
"DOCTOR S. Colbert speaks for ME!"]
Cheers!
Meg
If we can’t lick ‘em with lawsuits, testifying at the FDA or before Henry Waxman, here is a new weapon: COMEDY!!! Thank you, Stephen Colbert.
Jaynesday
Way funny! Maybe a sign of the times… On a serious note, I wonder…
How much does it make the upper echelons of pharma cringe when popular comedians begin to poke fun at pharmacological overindulgence? (is that a real term?)
I predict that there are some heavily sweating brows and some very deep concern about this whole mess that they’ve put themselves in. I would also predict that it won’t be too long before they curse the day that Daniel Troy invented FDA preemption. Also that another ton of money is being earmarked for public relations repair. Work with us pharma not against us, for your good and for ours.
Atlex
Condor,
Feel free not to take a statin. I’ll take my chances and continue to take mine. To me its worth the money.
Atlex
Condor
Hey Atlex — hard workouts, steady, healthy, low-fat meals, a life-long love of adventure-sporting, of all kinds, leaves me at extremely low-risk — even as I enter my fifth decade on this planet. . . .
And leads me to believe I’ll not likely ever need those products.
I am impressed by the Jupiter results, make no mistake, but I am too healthy for any cholesterol medication. This is as such about philosophy of living as it is about scientific risk of mortality, for me. I won’ t do it.
I strongly suspect that whatever issues I’ll face in my golden years, they will not include elevated cholesterol — I am also blessed with a genetic gift on that score.
So Dr. Colbert speaks for me — and I exercise for me, too.
Cheers! h
Madison
Oh the obsession with cholesterol. Big bucks for Big Pharma and Big Trouble for many statin users.
My hubby suffered severe muscle loss from Lipitor. But the docs didn’t want to believe it. They ordered up every test under the sun, looking for the cause, until hubby demanded the blood test for rhabdomyolysis. No more Lipitor. He had even lost 20% of his heart muscle, which he has since regained, but, after four years, he still suffers from leg cramps.
The docs, still obessed with his chlolestrol levels, talked him into trying Zetia — a different form of statin. He took it for one week and quit when his legs got worse.
Why is this poison still on the market and being so readily prescribed to perfectly healthy people? An article earlier this year in Business Week (I believe), noted that only one in 100 patients receive any benefit from statins.
Atlex
Condor,
Wonderful for you. I, too, exercise and eat right, but without a relatively low dose of a statin my LDL would be elevated (moreover, I have other uncontrollable risk factors–eg, being male, a father with MI at 55). Even with your regimen, you may find your risk factors climb as you make your way well into your 5th decade. Be thankful that you have the option of a statin if your regimen fails.
As for you Madison, it’s a shame that your doctors didn’t recognize this rare, but well-known side effect of statins. They should have. However, statins have proven time and time again to save lives. They are hardly poisons. TRhe greater poison is misinformation. (By the way, Zetia is not a statin and has never been shown to have the clinical benefit of statins.)
Atlex
Nathan
Madison writes: “An article earlier this year in Business Week (I believe), noted that only one in 100 patients receive any benefit from statins.”
We’ve discussed this in some detail before. It would be great if we could identify “a priori” the specific patients who would benefit from statins (or all drugs, for that matter). Unfortunately science isn’t there yet, and probably won’t be for quite some time.
Also, as we’ve also discussed, the vast majority of air bags in cars never save a life. Does that mean they are ineffective and not worthwhile?
Condor
Nathan — yours is a churlish metaphor.
Airbags don’t have “side-effects” unless they deploy — and a broken nose or wrist is a small price — for your very life.
Cholesterol medications — all of them — have life long side effects. Airbags do not.
So, your argument obscures the clarity of Madison’s point:
If — as the research now indicates — a healthy adult has a TWO-in-100 chance of heart attack, after age 50, at what point do the “side-effects” (and $100 per month, for life!) OUTWEIGH the marginal decline in one’s risk — to merely ONE-in-100?
This is, as I wrote yesterday to Atlex, as much a philospoical question, as a scientific one.
I come out — as does Madison, apparently — on the side of “I can (and WILL!) accept a 2/100ths chance of having a random heart attack”.
Don’t reduce her argument to an absurdity.
Cheeers!
Evil Pharmaceutical Scientist
Thank goodness for patsies like Nathan. They make my job so much easier.
There’s several ways I make sure that people are treated with my drugs, even when I know they can’t possibly benefit.
1. When I do my phase III studies if I know that it only works in a specific subgroup of only the very sickest patients with a different subdiagnosis who respond very well, what I do is I include less severely ill patients from a different subgroup (say 40% of patients). Then the study is positive overall for all the patients studies and I have an indication for both subgroups. FDA doesn’t always check for things like this. Even if FDA checks the managers can override it for me.
2. Even if the studied groups are very specific I make sure that the indication is much more generic.
3. Once the drug’s approved I promote it off label for other subgroups who are even less severely ill who I never studied.
4. If there are differences between drugs in the class and mine doesn’t work for an additional indication because of some difference that I know about by receptor binding studies. I simply never get the indication and let my paid consultants say it’s probably effective as a class effect anyway.
5. If I find a way to predict who’s going to respond while doing studies, for example while doing Cat Scans for ‘research purposes’ during phase II. I simply don’t tell the FDA.
6. I know FDA doesn’t do true risk benefit assessments. Let’s take antidepressants as an example. The placebo response rate is ~50% - 60% and the response rate on drug is only 60% - 70%. So the true marginal response rate is only 10% - 20%. Now if I have a lethal side effect like suicide that shows up in 0.5% of people on drug in the first couple of weeks and virtually no one on placebo at all. Then for every 200 people treated I’ll get only around 30 people who respond to drug and 1 person who dies. This doesn’t even count all the others who don’t get benefit who have cardiac and other nasty side effects, remember nearly everyone of the other 170 people who don’t respond will have some sort of toxicity. Plus no one will know about the true death rate because it’s under the 5% rate for labeling under new agreements I’ve made with FDA. We’ve also written up an FDA guidance that appears to promote quantitative risk assessment, but it’s so generic that it’s worthless. Plus when you look at the references the only risk that’s to be assessed is the adverse financial effect on me if FDA doesn’t approve the drug.
7. As for the science not being there yet. I’ve been studying the genetics of people since the 1990’s by collecting blood during every study. But we in Pharma got an agreement under the critical path initiative that we don’t have to submit this genetic data to the review division. We submit it under the voluntary geneic program put they won’t tell the drug reviewers anything even though the law says we have to submit all safety related data in the NDA.
I want to sell as many drugs as possible, the only time I’ll ever tell FDA about a predictive test for efficacy is if I need to enrich or save the study because it fails otherwise even with limiting subpopulations, or it’s too dangerous and FDA won’t approve it unless I can limit the indication.
Bwaahahaha!!
Nathan
Condor writes: “Cholesterol medications — all of them — have life long side effects. Airbags do not.”
Are you saying that they have side effects for ALL people, or just a subset of people? (I know many many people who take them for years without issue)
“Airbags don’t have “side-effects” unless they deploy”
That’s true. I wish we could come up with a statin that would only be utilized (“deploy”) if the risk was very high. But, as I said, the science isn’t there yet. Maybe another 10-20 years and we will be there. In the meantime, this is the best we have. As we’ve said before, there isn’t a concrete answer for this question. It is a risk-benefit analysis. The FDA has come down on the side of the drug being approvable. That doesn’t mean that they are cost-effective. It only means that in the opinion of the FDA, the benefit outweighs the risk.
You seem very vehement about this issue. I’m not sure why:
1) Are you arguing that the FDA should not have approved these drugs?
2) Or or are you arguing that most individuals shouldn’t take them because they aren’t cost-effective for society?
3) Or is there some other argument you are trying to make?
I genuinely want to understand your concern here. I can’t tell if it is just a general mistrust of the pharma industry or if it is a concern with the approval of this specific drug.
Nathan
Finally got around to watching the video — I finally found something I can agree with Condor about — it’s hilarious!
Jim
Evil Pharma gets right to the point I have been trying to make about the Jupitor Study; the stduy included smoker’s, individuals with a degree of hypertension, metabolic disorder, and individuals with a family history of CVE. The final numbers do not break out those individuals from the final tally.
I recognize that some individuals will benefit from the use of statins but I am of the opinion that the single biggest predictor of a an individual experiencing a CVE is their genetic history. So while Atlex uses statins he at least as a rational argument based on genetics for his use of the drug. If Zetia demonstrated anything it demonstrated that lowered LDL is not the holy grail that pharma has been preaching and the medical professions has been buying.
One of the greatest health problems facing Americans today is obesity, many prescription medications contribute to this problem and overuse of prescription medications may actually be part of the reason that the American life expectancy rate is expected to drop.