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Quite often, some patients with unrelenting back pain could be "doing themselves in" with a prescription cholesterol lowering, statin drug.

It's not unusual for doctors to ignore their patients complaints of pain, "Is it the statin drug causing my muscle pain?" Certainly physicians are aware that statin drugs cause muscle damage, yet it is taught that this is only a "rare" side-effect of the drug.

Finally, a new study reveals that most integrative physicians have known all along about these drugs, that they damage virtually everyone who uses them, and worse than previously thought.

If a patient had concerns over statin drug muscle injury, a physician would test blood levels of creatine phosphokinase, and if high would suggest muscle damage. It turns out, this test is just not accurate.

The "rare" muscle injury suffered from statin drug users is probably closer to 97%. It's been amazing to me how often doctors of patients would just brush off their patient's concerns of muscle pain and weakness.

The authors of the study mentioned that normal or moderately elevated levels of creatine phosphokinase do not exclude statin-associated muscle injury. They went on to state that alternative treatment strategies for patients with muscle symptoms need to be evaluated.

When 83 patients were evaluated in the study, 44 of those were on the cholesterol lowering statin drugs complained of muscle pain, while another 19 on the drugs reported no complaints.

Of the 44 patients who complained of pain, 25 of them sustained significant damage to their muscle tissue. Interestingly, of the patients with muscle damage, 96% of them had levels of creatine phosphokinase in the normal ranges!

This study confirms the true chaos that is indeed occuring in those who are taking statin drugs, and if the muscle damage isn't present yet, it is quite likely that it will be.

Of the patients taking the statin drugs who suffered no pain, 5% of them had biopsies revealing muscle damage.

The authors of the study had stated that the results may be an underestimate of the actual extent of muscle damage. This is because some of the biopsies may have been taken at the site of unaffected muscles.

Aside from the findings of this study, it's important to note that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. Moreover, the only 'benefit' of these statins is the reduction of inflammation, yet the same results can be achieved with a thousand milligrams of vitamin C.

It's not certain as of this writing, yet researchers currently believe that statins in some may raise the activity of the vitamin D receptor, possibly lowering inflammation. However, there is a tinge of irony to this effect, because at the same time, statin drugs appear to cause a vitamin D deficiency.

If this is indeed accurate, it may well explain why these statin drugs can create "mysterious" pain in chronic back pain sufferers.

If what you've read so far isn't enough to have you question the use of statin drugs, the researchers at the University of Nottingham found that some statins can lead to an increased risk of liver dysfunction, acute kidney failure, myopathy and cataracts in patients.

When in doubt, a good dosage for most on vitamin D3 supplementation is 5,000 IU per day.