Statins for kids? The very idea is insane, yet millions of children are already taking these “adult” meds — and a new set of guidelines aims to give these drugs to millions more, including kids still in elementary school.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute says every child between the ages of 9 and 11 should be screened for cholesterol, even if they’re in perfect health and have no family history of high cholesterol or heart problems.

Forget that there’s no evidence high cholesterol is even harmful to a child. And don’t even think about the fact that supposedly high LDL levels in kids usually normalize on their own over time.

Nope, none of that matters any more. All that matters now are the numbers on the blood test. And if your kid’s number comes up, he needs to be “treated.”

That’s code for those cholesterol meds, especially the statins that make up some of the best-selling drugs in the world despite side effects such as debilitating muscle pain, kidney and liver damage, cataracts and even a higher risk of diabetes.

If there’s one group of doctors out there who should be standing in the way of this, it’s the doctors who supposedly know children best — like the members of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

But that organization actually helped to create the new guidelines — and, in fact, last year called for giving statins to kids as young as 8 years old. (Read about that here.)

This failure to protect our children from over-medication is not a surprising one. Just last month, this very same group called for giving ADHD meds to children barely out of diapers. (Read the full story here.)

You might say they can’t keep their hands away from their prescription pads — because even without these new guidelines, they’ve been busily passing out adult meds to children for years now.

In 2009 alone, pediatricians wrote nearly 3 million prescriptions for cholesterol meds for kids, including 2.3 million statin prescriptions. So many kids are on these meds that Pfizer even created a chewable Lipitor just for children — and it’s already been approved in Europe.

Thanks to the new guidelines, you can bet we’ll be seeing it here at some point, too.

Statins aren’t the only adult drugs aimed at kids. Millions of children are already hooked on painkillers, antidepressants, BP meds, diabetes drugs and more.

But all of these conditions, up to and including high cholesterol, can be treated and defeated without a single med.

Now, you just have to find a doctor who still knows how to do it.

Our old friends at Big Pharma are at it again – trying to get more people to take a drug they don’t need, for something it wasn’t even made for.

Millions of Americans are already taking statins to help manage their cholesterol. The drugs are already unnecessary for most people, because cholesterol can be controlled through your diet. It’s that simple, and I can show you how.

But that’s beside the point for now, because the newest plan to get even more people on statins has nothing to do with cholesterol management.

Now, Big Pharma wants you to take them for a completely different purpose altogether.

They’re pointing to a new study, called JUPITER, which shows that statins can help lower levels of C-Reactive Protein, or CRP, in people with normal LDL cholesterol.

High levels of CRP could be one indicator of inflammation in the arteries, which could lead to heart attacks.

The problem is, no one can tell you just how reliable CRP levels are as an indicator of heart disease risk, because no one knows for sure.

But they want you to take those statins anyway.  They have their eyes on one number right now, and it has nothing to do with LDL or CRP levels. That number is 11 million – the estimated number of new patients who could start taking statins for their CRP levels.

Statins are the industry’s favorite kind of drug. They don’t heal or cure, and they don’t treat the underlying causes. They simply “manage” the condition. In this case, “manage” is a codeword for a drug that you need to keep on taking if you want to keep getting the benefit.

The result: A drug people need to take forever. You can’t even imagine how happy that makes some people who wear very expensive suits.

Here’s one other truth about statins that Big Pharma can’t hide: Patients without a history of heart disease don’t live a single second longer when they take statins to control their cholesterol. This has been confirmed in study after study after study.

It’s just one more case of the wrong drug, for the wrong people, for all the wrong reasons.

December 2007 PDF Redefining “normal”: Is your doctor aware of these emerging markers of heart-health risk? The medical mainstream clings to measuring cholesterol levels as if they were the last life raft in the sea of civilized medicine. It seems as though too many doctors have been programmed to believe that cholesterol numbers are the [...]