In the meantime, the data supporting statins are among the best ever compiled. The advances contributed by groups calling themselves "holistic" are entirely absent. And the willingness of modern medicine to introspect and change in the face of data is slow but meaningful.
I asked this same question the other day and still have yet to get a meaningful response: what is the "holistic" treatment for HIV?
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/ has some interesting pages against statins. Personally I'd scrutinize things as best I could before considering following a doctor's recommendation for statins.
I'm pretty ignorant about the holistic health thing, but wouldn't a fairer question be what's the holistic treatment for a given person with HIV? I thought the whole point was to consider a whole person as a complex system, not a database record with the feature "HIV+".
Thank you for sharing the link. Her articles are not peer reviewed, and I don't think they would pass muster. She seems to blend evidence with anecdote to argue for a point. For example, lines such as "Increasingly, orthopedic clinics are seeing patients whose problems turn out to be solvable by simply terminating statin therapy, as evidenced by a recent report of three cases within a single year in one clinic, all of whom had normal creatine kinase levels, the usual indicator of muscle damage monitored with statin usage, and all of whom were "cured" by simply stopping statin therapy (Shyam Kumar et al., 2008)".
One case report does not bear the same weight as a randomized, controlled trial (of which there are now dozens). Yet that's the kind of stuff that's the basis for her argument. The reference about fructose in the next paragraph twists Vila's paper 180 degrees. Etc. I would be interested to see what would happen if she submitted this as a review paper. I sincerely doubt that it would get published, not because of her conclusions, but because of the way in which this paper mistreats evidence.
Ugandan Health Minister claims to know 3 people cured of HIV through prayer. (1.2m people living with HIV, 150,000 children; this is especially troubling because Uganda is often cited as good example)
South Africa's health minister delayed ARVs for years; President doubts links between HIV and AIDS; 330,000 people die as a direct result. Even after ARVs introduced minister claims olive oil, beetroot and garlic are effective.
Swaziland government fails to tender properly; a shortage of drugs is covered up by that government promoting folk remedies. (33% of the sexually active adult population were HIV+; about 66% of the population lived on less than $2 per day)
Just in case you think all those links are old, it still happens. Here's a link about people selling 37ml of Ubhejane for $210. (About 80% of the Ugandan population earn less than $1 per day.)
In the meantime, the data supporting statins are among the best ever compiled. The advances contributed by groups calling themselves "holistic" are entirely absent. And the willingness of modern medicine to introspect and change in the face of data is slow but meaningful.
I asked this same question the other day and still have yet to get a meaningful response: what is the "holistic" treatment for HIV?