I just attended a physician lecture regarding advanced lipid testing. The speaker was from one of the local preventive cardiology centers, or should I call it, come here to get your Statin centers and don’t forget to super-size your meal on the way home.
The message is to use advanced testing, including genetic markers as a means and argument to prescribe more and more medication, the recommendations and research funded and supported by none other then Pharmacia. I had to clear my ears when the cardiologist so proudly told the audience, he needed to place his fourteen-year-old daughter on life long cholesterol lowering medication because of her genetic markers. Are you kidding me!
Amy, who is my medical assistant and attended, was livid when the speaker sloughed over nutrition and the nutrition related apo-E genetic markers. She asked the speaker to further elaborate about the benefits of nutrition and the side effects of statin’s.
The typical response from the speaker, oh yes, diet and exercise can help but how many patients can actually loose weight. Following the usual chuckle from the audience, the doctor sitting next to us quietly told us he had lost almost 200 pounds after almost dying from a massive MI.
Here are my points – I am certain that most mainstream doc’s care about their patient’s health, but we don’t always have to work for the pharmaceutical industry. In our office we use advanced lipid testing to measure the benefits of low-carb high-fat diets, we do not use these tests for the purpose of starting medication. The one caveat, patients who fail on low-fat low-calorie diets and or standard American diets, remain overweight and probably need all the medication that mainstream medicine can provide.
