What was the colchicine dose in LoDoCo

If your intent here is to address patients rather than colleagues then you are making the mistake which it seems is becoming almost the rule with specialists: you confuse your specialty with medicine as a whole and make recommendations based upon your narrow little worldview of cardiology rather tahn upon what is helpful for the head-to-toe health of your patients and readers.

But it's one thing to be injudicious and another to be just plain medically reckless and you win the bonehead-of-the-month award for the latter in telling people, literally, to stop taking multivitamins. Geeze, I mean even if you don't do much reading outside your cardiology world, surely you read the daily paper, or Time Magazine or the Wall Street Journal. All of them and thousands more published in the last month the results of a double-blind study by Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, of Brigham and Women's Hospital of 15,000 male physicians, half of whom took placebo and half of whom took a multivitamin.

After 11 years, a statistically significant 8% reduction in the number of cancers was observed for the group taking multivitamins. Not an earthshaking number, but one which should shut up know-it-alls who, as it happens, don't quite know it all. If taking multivitamins can affect 1 disease process, how many others might it affect? Apparently, you're not interested in the answer.

Here's the link in a publication which you will want to afford great authority: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/10/17/multivitamins-cancer-risk-men/1638929/.

First, fish oil pills, the only sustainable way to get marine fatty acids.  As Dr. Seth B should well know, there was a highly significant p=0.009 benefit in late secondary prevention heart failure patients in the respected n=~7000 GISSI-HF trial [Lancet 2008, supported by Pfizer and AZ].   Not all trials are as well set up and designs differ, some set up for failure.  Low cost, no harm.

Second, vitamins.  HOPE-2, also well respected, found a stroke benefit in late secondary prevention while in stroke victims with [extremely high, likely stroke-causal, homocysteine] and thus a very high hip fracture risk, there was an 80% reduced risk thereof -vs- placebo from only 2 homocysteine lowering B-vitamins such as is found in a high level multivitamin.  Interestingly, there was likely improved collagen quality in those patients and we all know that collagen has a short half life in heart [~4 months] yet it being its main structural protein.  Copy and paste this for a combo-graph www.health-heart.org/HIPandHOPE.gif

Let's not flush OTC known essential nutrient supplements since there is plenty to be happy about.  For example, cost, safety -- if not the failure of statins to ever reduce mortality in women [all RCTs] and in anybody over age 70 [PROSPER] as well as the failure to lower mortality in all studies ever done using atorva, lova, ceriva and fluva-statin, and re CV mortality using rosuva.

the last comment was sponsored by GNC. makers of fine vitamans for all disseases