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Wellness Wednesday for November 20, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I wish I was better informed about cholesterol, but statins do have minor risks and side effects, such as muscle pain and outright muscle breakdown in rhabdomyolysis. It's rare, but hardly unheard of.

There's always been debate about the benefits of statins, but at least in the UK they're usually prescribed to middle aged people with cardiovascular risk factors, or the elderly who have had heart attacks or strokes as secondary prevention. You're right that aggressive screening of prostate cancer is a net negative, especially in the elderly.

I actually know a physician who ended up with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statin-associated_autoimmune_myopathy

Huh. Never heard of this before, poor bastard.

There's def reasons we don't give everyone Statins and Metformin, but everyone always forgets lol.

I assumed the reason we don't give everyone metformin is because of the very memorable bathroom visits that it causes.

Metformin is seemingly more benign than statins (which have a bigger argument) but has a few significant drug interactions and a bunch of hypothetical (read: hotly debated) kidney and Lactic Acidosis issues.

Most otherwise safe medications have COVID vaccine problems - you give em to the entire population and weird shit starts happen. One in a million side effects happen hundreds of times.