Since then I have put myself on a low-glycemic diet for other reasons and one of the effects has been to discontinue the cholesterol-lowering drug. The diet lowered it naturally.
Unfortunately the nerve damage done to my feet stays with me to today And makes buying shoes a real effort because most cause my feet to hurt.
My doctor was either unwilling to acknowledge or blind to the side effect. I figured it out from Internet searches. I even found a book written by an ex-astronaut named Lipitor, Thief of Memory. His wife found him one morning on the front lawn, now knowing who he was or where he was.
Years ago, I developed a non-diabetes related neuropathy in my feet that started with the feeling of cotton balls between my toes but over the space of a few months grew to feel like someone spraying a blow torch over the bottoms of my feet. The only thing that would stop that was a powerful drug that they normally prescribe for seizures. This drug, after taking it for over ten years, unbeknownst to me, has an undocumented side effect of WEIGHT GAIN in 1/10th of 1% of its users. . . guess who was in that small minority of users? Yup me. I gained over 160 pounds. . . while eating a normal diet. I could not figure out why I was gaining weight. I could stop eating and gain five pounds.
In any case, I have an extremely bad back since I was in elementary school and was taking a two year pain management regimen when Dr. Pham asked my why I was on this particular med. I told him about the phantom pain in my feet and he said he didn't like the med I was on because of the bad side effects it had. I told him I had read the PDR on it and was experiencing none of the listed side effects. He then told me about the non-listed weight-gain. BINGO! He said he was going to change it to something not quite as effective but a lot safer with out the side effects. He put me on another drug that had to be titrated over several months and warned me that if I ever stopped it, it had to be titrated OFF of it for at least a year and a half or there could be severe psychiatric problems! Scary drug. . . but it worked. The GOOD thing was I started shedding weight like crazy when combined with a low carb diet. I lost 150 pounds in about 10 months!
In any case, when they put my on that DAMN STATIN. . . I'd take that drug and in a few hours my phantom pain would flare up. . . and I'd get manic. In later research I learned this and other drugs of its class, including the one I had taken before to control my phantom pain, means to be effective were BLOCKED by statins! These drugs were literally TURNED off by the statins in the space of FOUR HOURS! This is from notes I submitted to my doctor during the period which she confirmed in her research:
Research in the development notes of the statin drugs showed that Atovastatin and other statins have a STRONG effect on increasing metabolism of CYP3A4 Substrates such as Tegretol, Topiramate, and other nerve blocking drugs which have a severe psychiatric side effect if stopped cold turkey. The Statin effectively switched off the effectiveness of (the drug I was taking) in blocking the paraesthesia in my feet, and then, also triggered the firing of the now unblocked nerves, accelerating the firing of other previously suppressed nerves that had compensated for the suppressing drug which then causes the psychological issues.
Since someone was supposed to be weaned off the drug over a year and a half to avoid severe problems, instead was dropped COLD turkey in just FOUR HOURS, and not only that even the blood levels did not count, it was HELL! I found myself going through eBay for items I was interested in OVER and OVER again, in the space of minutes thinking the listings would change and new listings would be added. . . constantly. I became obsessed with it. . . until I took my next dosage of the pain medication then I would be OK until another dosage of the Statin. . . I spent over four grand on eBay on stuff I didn't need in four months. . . good thing it was things I could give my girlfriend!
Once I figured out what was going on, which was hard to do with my mind not working well, I stopped the statin and things went back to normal. It took about two weeks to get my blood levels of the drug evened out and my feet back to not being on a pain roller-coaster. The physical changes in my body took a lot longer to recover from . . . and I will NEVER, EVER take another Statin in my life.