Comment by KempyKolibri
Comment by KempyKolibri 2 days ago
Because medication is more effective. Side effects from statins are relatively uncommon and generally mild, so it wouldn’t be ethical to use lifestyle as a first-line treatment in place of, say, a combination of low dose statin and pcsk9 inhibitors.
However many clinicians do take a “let’s sort out the problem as quickly as possible with medication, and if you want to try lifestyle and back off (or even stop entirely) the meds and see how your cholesterol is afterwards, we can do that.”
This seems like a good balance to me.
Wait isn’t this the other way around?
In reality lifestyle modifications are more conservative than using a medication so lifestyle modification would be first line from an ethical perspective.
In reality though it does seem like statins are used first line by many clinicians. But ethically speaking conservative interventions like lifestyle modification in terms of changing diet and exercise should be used prior to medicating a young otherwise healthy person.
In other groups such as when someone has had a recent heart attack of course the thought process is different. Such people should be immediately placed on a statin.