You read it right: the American Diabetes Association wants everyone with diabetes to take an expensive prescription drug -- for life, presumably -- on the off chance that it might someday turn out to be helpful in some unknown way that has never been tested or scientifically supported. Folks, this is medical madness, and if the FDA weren't working so hard to protect the pharmaceutical industry, they would step in and issue a statement challenging this precarious advice by the ADA.
Red yeast rice, a natural food supplement, lowers cholesterol far more effectively than statins. Can you imagine the outcry from the FDA if the American Diabetes Association suddenly announced that all diabetics should be taking red yeast rice based on the hope that it might help them in some unknown way? The FDA would immediately take to the airwaves, screaming, "It's not proven! It's dangerous advice!" But when it's a drug that's being recommended to patients, against all scientific merit, the FDA stands back and says nothing. This is nothing more than blatant medical dogma in action.
So what's the real reason the American Diabetes Association is pushing these statin drugs so hard without a shred of scientific evidence that they are helpful to diabetics? Let's take a closer look: it turns out that the ADA receives millions of dollars each year in money from drug companies! Some of the association's top sponsors, giving at least $500,000, are some of the wealthiest pharmaceutical companies on the planet: Novartis, Merck, Parke-Davis, Pfizer, SmithKline Beecham, Takeda, Bayer, Aventis and Eli Lilly. And that money, it turns out, buys a lot of influence. The ADA has become a propaganda machine for the pharmaceutical industry, just like the FDA. Now they're hawking drugs to diabetics with absolutely no justification. They're not even pretending that statins are helpful to diabetics: they're saying that maybe, someday, they might be discovered to be helpful. In the mean time, they're saying, all diabetics should be chemical guinea pigs.
On top of all this, it turns out that statins are highly dangerous drugs: they interfere with normal liver function and block the production of sex hormones, among dozens of other documented side effects. When will our country learn that prescription drugs are not the answer?