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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Do Cholesterol Drugs Kill More than they Help? Monday Aug 23rd 7 PM - Health Sciences Seminar

News Release

Do Cholesterol Drugs Kill More than they Help?

Contact:
sams@bestselfusa.com 239/591-4565

Monday Health Sciences Seminar –

This is an extremely important issue, relevant to 80 million Americans!
Please share this with anyone who has, or cares about, people dealing with heart concerns.


Mensa membership is not required; this seminar is open to the public.
On Monday August 23rd from 7PM to 8:30 PM Sam and Bunny Sewell are hosting:

DANGEROUS PRESCRIPTION – A PBS Frontline Special
A look inside the FDA, its recent record, and the debate over whether our nation’s drug safety system is broken.

The particular focus of this program is “statin” drugs, like:
· Lipitor (atorvastatin)
· Lescol (fluvastatin)
· Mevacor (lovastatin)
· Pravachol (pravastatin)
· Zocor (simvastatin)
· Crestor (rosuvastatin)
Scientifically substantiated natural cholesterol reduction supplements will also be discussed.
As medications assume ever-larger roles in health care, the importance of FDA approval mounts. But what do average Americans know about the FDA process? What happens when a drug product harms consumers, and what role do drug companies play in approving and monitoring drugs?

DANGEROUS PRESCRIPTION offers a FRONTLINE investigation into the FDA and drug safety, showing how effective the FDA is at identifying drugs that don't work or cause harm.

Always good discussions afterward. Feel free to bring friends!

Sam & Bunny Sewell
10202 Vanderbilt Dr
(NE corner, @ 102nd Ave)
Naples, Fl 34108

Because of limited space, please let us know ASAP if would like to attend
RSVP: 239/591-4565 bunnysam@bestselfusa.com

Sam's Personal Experience With Lipitor
http://thenaturaladvocate.blogspot.com/2010/08/sams-personal-experience-with-lipitor.html

Sam's Personal Experience With Lipitor

My Personal Experience with Lipitor
Excerpt from: “I FIRED MY DOCTORS AND SAVED MY LIFE” by Sam and Bunny Sewell

Sinister Science
The day after our visit with Dr. Star, we had an appointment with Dr. George Babbitt (whose code-name alas, won’t make sense without a background in American Literature).

As it happened, this first appointment with a physician did absolutely nothing to ease my growing suspicion of modern cardiac medicine. He reiterated the message from Dr. Ghoul: my medical needs could not be met in Naples and I was being referred to a surgeon in Tampa for a heart transplant.

I asked Dr. Babbitt about the Lipitor dose he had prescribed me. By then, I had already found for myself the safety and efficacy FDA studies that originally approved Lipitor. These studies had used doses of 2.5 mg and 5 mg daily. Yet interestingly, the lowest available dose of Lipitor manufactured by the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, was 10mg – double the highest dose used in the FDA studies for safety and effectiveness!

If that wasn’t enough to raise my eyebrows, Dr. Babbitt prescribed 80 mg daily doses of Lipitor – 16 to 32 times the doses used in the FDA studies. I told my doctor about my research on the FDA studies.

“You shouldn’t worry about those FDA reports – I have studies showing that 80 milligrams per day are safe, and more effective than those lower doses.”

I asked him who had done his studies.
“Pfizer.”

I didn’t tell him that I was already aware of the Pfizer sponsored studies.

I suspect that Dr. Babbitt never saw the actual Pfizer studies, but had simply taken the word of a “detail man,” a representative of a drug manufacturer who calls on doctors to promote the products from that company. I wondered if he would be so enthusiastic about high-dose Lipitor had he actually read the study.

In 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report funded by Pfizer that described the efficacy of high-dose Lipitor in cardiovascular disease. The authors concluded that high-dose Lipitor (80 mg) was superior to a ‘standard dose’ (10 mg) in reducing negative cardiovascular events in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients. Ten thousand CHD patients participated in the five-year study. Half of them received a daily dose of 80 mg of Lipitor, while the other half received a control, ‘standard’ dose of 10 mg/day.

The Pfizer study observed a reduction in major cardiovascular events in the high-dose Lipitor group (heart attack and/or stroke) over the course of the experiment. In the 80 mg group, 8.7% (or 434 patients) suffered a major cardiovascular event, compared to 10.9% (or 548 patients) of patients in the standard 10 mg group. When you do the math, that’s a difference of 2.2% – or 104 fewer cardiovascular incidences in the high-dose Lipitor group – a statistically significant improvement over standard treatment. Furthermore, only 126 patients in the 80 mg/day Lipitor group died from cardiovascular problems during the study, as compared to 155 in the 10 mg/day group.

I was surprised to discover that treatments were tested and put into practice with such small efficacy ratings. But, 2.2% is better than nothing, right?

Not when you take into account that in this same study, 158 deaths due to non-cardiovascular events occurred in the 80 mg/day group (3.2%), versus only 127 (2.5%) in the lower dose condition. Cancer, particularly lung and gastrointestinal, was responsible for more than half of these deaths. Hemorrhagic stroke and other, non-traumatic causes contributed to the remainder of non-cardiovascular deaths in both treatment conditions. However, this difference of 31 more deaths from non-cardiac related causes in the high-dose group brings the total deaths to 282 in the 10 mg Lipitor group, and 284 in the 80 mg group – statistically, that means there was no difference at all. Your chances of survival were actually 1 in 5000 lower if you took a high dose rather than a standard dose of Lipitor.

Between the actual statistics revealing the serious side effects associated with Lipitor and other statin drugs, and the failure to improve overall survival rate by using higher doses of Lipitor, I suspected that my doctor, had he actually been up on the facts, could have made a wiser choice. However, the professional to whom I was entrusting my life didn’t seem to be as well informed on the subject as I was. Later I was to discover that this isn’t unusual; it doesn’t take much research to be better informed than some doctors.

However, it was easy to understand why the drug salesmen from Pfizer only talked about the (tiny) advantage in reducing cardiac events and failed to mention the fact that there was no overall advantage in reducing death.

So why were the patients in the high-dose Lipitor study dying more frequently from non-cardiovascular causes? At this point, the mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear – we just can’t tell. But as one expert in the field wrote, “we need further reassurance as to the safety of this approach before making this higher dose a standard practice in CHD pharmacological therapy.” Despite their prevalence, the statins are not the only available method that can be used to lower LDL-C levels. Hybrid therapies with other drugs, natural therapies, and nutrition can all be effectively used for this purpose. But my highly paid doctor didn’t know that, either.

Muscle Pain and Weakness
Shortly after I left the hospital, I began experiencing significant pain in my arms and shoulders. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but the pain was incessant, a relentless twenty-four hours a day, every long day. On a severity scale from 1 to 10 (10 being excruciating, 1 being a hangnail), my pain fluctuated between 6 and 8. I struggled to dress myself, to the point that I stopped wearing T-shirts because of the sheer pain it caused to pull them on over my head. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t get comfortable, and even when I did slip into unconsciousness, pain shook me awake again. The upper body exercises I needed to do in preparation for surgery were impossible.

We hired two massage therapists to try to help me cope with the pain. They each came to our home once a week. On Thursdays came Frau Athena, so named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, arts, industry, justice and skill. Frau Athena was a German woman, as beautiful, strong, highly skilled, intelligent, and kind as the goddess. She knew that pain was part of the process of healing through massage, and showed no qualms about inflicting pain on me. Once, I muttered a weak joke (through clenched teeth) as she kneaded my aching muscles, “I told you, I don’t know where the diamonds are.”

“Dustin Hoffman from Marathon Man,” she quickly responded, amused by the attempt.

Frau Athena always ended my sessions by simply being gentle and kind; more than once did I fall asleep during the soothing massage & foot rub during the last few minutes of her therapy sessions.

On Saturdays came my other massage therapist – code name Bruce Lee – the Buddhist who practices massage therapy as if it were a martial art. A long-time friend of the family, he has a kind heart, but his technique is more competent than kind – he all but beat me up for my own good, a sort of ‘tough love’ massage therapy. Bruce Lee knows more about physiology and human chemistry than most of the doctors I’d been working with. He’s worked several years with Dr. Nobel; together, the two of them probably make the best alternative medicine team in the world. What’s more, Bruce Lee is not just a massage therapist: he also owns a successful Pilates studio and acts as a health consultant to some of the most wealthy and successful people in the nation. I joked that he could always moonlight for the CIA because he could get terrorists to talk by administering therapy, and no one could call it torture because he is licensed to do it.

But in addition to my constant pain, I was rapidly growing weaker and my muscle mass was noticeably deteriorating. I was horrified to see my usually well-muscled upper arms begin to wrinkle and shrink. After only a month of drug treatment, Bunny and I compared photos taken of me in the hospital to my appearance at that current point.

The difference in muscle size and tone was painfully obvious. On the first anniversary of my heart attack, as I finish this manuscript, I am still experiencing pain in my arms and shoulders. After less than six weeks on the medications, I had already researched the effects of Lipitor, and realized that the pain and weakness was not a side effect of the heart attack – but a side effect of the drug being used to treat the heart.

When that realization sank in, I actually got frightened. See, some of the side effects from statin drugs have killed people, and those same side effects were characterized by muscle pain and weakness. I knew that just because I had the symptoms, it didn’t necessarily guarantee that my medicine was going to prove fatal. However, my irrational self began to think, “The heart attack didn’t kill me but now the doctors and drug companies are going to kill me in a slow and agonizing way. Better to have died quickly, if I have to die anyway. If I am going to die someday let’s just get it over with”

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Say “GOODBYE” to Lipitor (and other statin drugs) Natural Cholesterol Reduction Complex (click image for full view)

Click for Full View

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Delivers 2,000 mg of plant sterols and stanols daily
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*NIH recommendation for lowering cholesterol: eat less saturated fat and cholesterol, exercise, lose weight, eat more soluble fiber, and consume 2,000 mg of plant sterols and stanols daily.

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Have a question about Cholesterol? Click here and ask me!

My Personal Experience with Lipitor
Excerpt from: “I FIRED MY DOCTORS AND SAVED MY LIFE” by Sam and Bunny Sewell

Sinister Science
The day after our visit with Dr. Star, we had an appointment with Dr. George Babbitt (whose code-name alas, won’t make sense without a background in American Literature).

As it happened, this first appointment with a physician did absolutely nothing to ease my growing suspicion of modern cardiac medicine. He reiterated the message from Dr. Ghoul: my medical needs could not be met in Naples and I was being referred to a surgeon in Tampa for a heart transplant.

I asked Dr. Babbitt about the Lipitor dose he had prescribed me. By then, I had already found for myself the safety and efficacy FDA studies that originally approved Lipitor. These studies had used doses of 2.5 mg and 5 mg daily. Yet interestingly, the lowest available dose of Lipitor manufactured by the pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, was 10mg – double the highest dose used in the FDA studies for safety and effectiveness!

If that wasn’t enough to raise my eyebrows, Dr. Babbitt prescribed 80 mg daily doses of Lipitor – 16 to 32 times the doses used in the FDA studies. I told my doctor about my research on the FDA studies.

“You shouldn’t worry about those FDA reports – I have studies showing that 80 milligrams per day are safe, and more effective than those lower doses.”

I asked him who had done his studies.
“Pfizer.”

I didn’t tell him that I was already aware of the Pfizer sponsored studies.

I suspect that Dr. Babbitt never saw the actual Pfizer studies, but had simply taken the word of a “detail man,” a representative of a drug manufacturer who calls on doctors to promote the products from that company. I wondered if he would be so enthusiastic about high-dose Lipitor had he actually read the study.

In 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine published a report funded by Pfizer that described the efficacy of high-dose Lipitor in cardiovascular disease. The authors concluded that high-dose Lipitor (80 mg) was superior to a ‘standard dose’ (10 mg) in reducing negative cardiovascular events in coronary heart disease (CHD) patients. Ten thousand CHD patients participated in the five-year study. Half of them received a daily dose of 80 mg of Lipitor, while the other half received a control, ‘standard’ dose of 10 mg/day.

The Pfizer study observed a reduction in major cardiovascular events in the high-dose Lipitor group (heart attack and/or stroke) over the course of the experiment. In the 80 mg group, 8.7% (or 434 patients) suffered a major cardiovascular event, compared to 10.9% (or 548 patients) of patients in the standard 10 mg group. When you do the math, that’s a difference of 2.2% – or 104 fewer cardiovascular incidences in the high-dose Lipitor group – a statistically significant improvement over standard treatment. Furthermore, only 126 patients in the 80 mg/day Lipitor group died from cardiovascular problems during the study, as compared to 155 in the 10 mg/day group.

I was surprised to discover that treatments were tested and put into practice with such small efficacy ratings. But, 2.2% is better than nothing, right?

Not when you take into account that in this same study, 158 deaths due to non-cardiovascular events occurred in the 80 mg/day group (3.2%), versus only 127 (2.5%) in the lower dose condition. Cancer, particularly lung and gastrointestinal, was responsible for more than half of these deaths. Hemorrhagic stroke and other, non-traumatic causes contributed to the remainder of non-cardiovascular deaths in both treatment conditions. However, this difference of 31 more deaths from non-cardiac related causes in the high-dose group brings the total deaths to 282 in the 10 mg Lipitor group, and 284 in the 80 mg group – statistically, that means there was no difference at all. Your chances of survival were actually 1 in 5000 lower if you took a high dose rather than a standard dose of Lipitor.

Between the actual statistics revealing the serious side effects associated with Lipitor and other statin drugs, and the failure to improve overall survival rate by using higher doses of Lipitor, I suspected that my doctor, had he actually been up on the facts, could have made a wiser choice. However, the professional to whom I was entrusting my life didn’t seem to be as well informed on the subject as I was. Later I was to discover that this isn’t unusual; it doesn’t take much research to be better informed than some doctors.

However, it was easy to understand why the drug salesmen from Pfizer only talked about the (tiny) advantage in reducing cardiac events and failed to mention the fact that there was no overall advantage in reducing death.

So why were the patients in the high-dose Lipitor study dying more frequently from non-cardiovascular causes? At this point, the mechanisms underlying this effect are unclear – we just can’t tell. But as one expert in the field wrote, “we need further reassurance as to the safety of this approach before making this higher dose a standard practice in CHD pharmacological therapy.” Despite their prevalence, the statins are not the only available method that can be used to lower LDL-C levels. Hybrid therapies with other drugs, natural therapies, and nutrition can all be effectively used for this purpose. But my highly paid doctor didn’t know that, either.

Muscle Pain and WeaknessShortly after I left the hospital, I began experiencing significant pain in my arms and shoulders. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but the pain was incessant, a relentless twenty-four hours a day, every long day. On a severity scale from 1 to 10 (10 being excruciating, 1 being a hangnail), my pain fluctuated between 6 and 8. I struggled to dress myself, to the point that I stopped wearing T-shirts because of the sheer pain it caused to pull them on over my head. I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t get comfortable, and even when I did slip into unconsciousness, pain shook me awake again. The upper body exercises I needed to do in preparation for surgery were impossible.

We hired two massage therapists to try to help me cope with the pain. They each came to our home once a week. On Thursdays came Frau Athena, so named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, arts, industry, justice and skill. Frau Athena was a German woman, as beautiful, strong, highly skilled, intelligent, and kind as the goddess. She knew that pain was part of the process of healing through massage, and showed no qualms about inflicting pain on me. Once, I muttered a weak joke (through clenched teeth) as she kneaded my aching muscles, “I told you, I don’t know where the diamonds are.”

“Dustin Hoffman from Marathon Man,” she quickly responded, amused by the attempt.

Frau Athena always ended my sessions by simply being gentle and kind; more than once did I fall asleep during the soothing massage & foot rub during the last few minutes of her therapy sessions.

On Saturdays came my other massage therapist – code name Bruce Lee – the Buddhist who practices massage therapy as if it were a martial art. A long-time friend of the family, he has a kind heart, but his technique is more competent than kind – he all but beat me up for my own good, a sort of ‘tough love’ massage therapy. Bruce Lee knows more about physiology and human chemistry than most of the doctors I’d been working with. He’s worked several years with Dr. Nobel; together, the two of them probably make the best alternative medicine team in the world. What’s more, Bruce Lee is not just a massage therapist: he also owns a successful Pilates studio and acts as a health consultant to some of the most wealthy and successful people in the nation. I joked that he could always moonlight for the CIA because he could get terrorists to talk by administering therapy, and no one could call it torture because he is licensed to do it.

But in addition to my constant pain, I was rapidly growing weaker and my muscle mass was noticeably deteriorating. I was horrified to see my usually well-muscled upper arms begin to wrinkle and shrink. After only a month of drug treatment, Bunny and I compared photos taken of me in the hospital to my appearance at that current point.

The difference in muscle size and tone was painfully obvious. On the first anniversary of my heart attack, as I finish this manuscript, I am still experiencing pain in my arms and shoulders. After less than six weeks on the medications, I had already researched the effects of Lipitor, and realized that the pain and weakness was not a side effect of the heart attack – but a side effect of the drug being used to treat the heart.

When that realization sank in, I actually got frightened. See, some of the side effects from statin drugs have killed people, and those same side effects were characterized by muscle pain and weakness. I knew that just because I had the symptoms, it didn’t necessarily guarantee that my medicine was going to prove fatal. However, my irrational self began to think, “The heart attack didn’t kill me but now the doctors and drug companies are going to kill me in a slow and agonizing way. Better to have died quickly, if I have to die anyway. If I am going to die someday let’s just get it over with”

Excerpt from: “I FIRED MY DOCTORS AND SAVED MY LIFE”
by Sam and Bunny Sewell
*Doctors, drugs & surgery are not always the best answer!
*Includes scientifically validated Total Life Saving Regimen!
*NOW ~ You can buy our new book:

Healthy, Natural Alternatives to Drugs and Surgery
and have it sent directly to family & friends at:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1575438

$19.95 PRINT ~ only $12.50 as PDF download
For autographed copies, call 239/591-4565

View videos at: www.ifiredmydoctors.blogspot.com

Read our famous Chapter 16 on Stress Management at
http://stressmood.blogspot.com/

Monday, August 2, 2010

Monday Health Sciences Seminar Aug.2 7PM - FOOD MATTERS

Still room for a few more. If you have NOT RSVPed & would like to see this, please let us know!
Spread the word. Bring friends. Everybody needs to see this one!


We are delighted to be able to show the informative, solution-focused documentary

FOOD MATTERS
a mUST SEE if we are going to be able to create healthier lives for our selves and our posterity!

Monday, August 2, 7-8:30PM
RSVP 591-4565 Seating limited! 10202 Vanderbilt Dr (NE Corner at 102nd Ave) Naples, Fl 34108

FOOD MATTERS is a VERY IMPORTANT feature length documentary film informing you on the best choices you can make for you and your family's health. In a collection of interviews with leading Nutritionists, Naturopaths, Scientists, M.D.s and Medical Journalists you will discover...

…WATCH THE TRAILER http://www.foodmatters.tv/

"Let thy Food be thy Medicine and thy Medicine be thy Food" - Hippocrates. That is the message from the founding father of modern medicine echoed in the controversial new documentary film Food Matters from Producer-Directors James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch.With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what's wrong with our malnourished bodies, it's no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide 'sickness industry' and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for overcoming illness naturally.
"With access to better information people invariably make better choices for their health..."
In what promises to be the most contentious idea put forward, the filmmakers have interviewed several leading experts in nutrition and natural healing who claim that not only are we harming our bodies with improper nutrition, but that the right kind of foods, supplements and detoxification can be used to treat chronic illnesses as fatal as terminally diagnosed cancer.The focus of the film is in helping us rethink the belief systems fed to us by our modern medical and health care establishments. The interviewees point out that not every problem requires costly, major medical attention and reveal many alternative therapies that can be more effective, more economical, less harmful and less invasive than conventional medical treatments.The ‘Food Matters' duo have independently funded the film from start to finish in order to remain as unbiased as possible, delivering a clear, concise message to the world. FOOD MATTERS!! Monday, August 2nd, 7PM. RSVP: 239/591-4565

It is way past time to slay the beast.



Pt 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSpkLk0vYmk
Pt 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B9MeO3SRxU&NR=1