Should even the healthy take statins?

"Preventive medicine focuses on encouraging the general public to worry about illnesses that they will probably never develop, and on doctors to search for remedies that they may never need. But it saves lives. The number of British men and women dying prematurely from heart attacks has fallen by almost a third over the past decade and much of the credit must go to the increasingly widespread use of the statin family of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Statins are taken by millions of people in the UK and are one of the key ingredients in the polypill (a collection of five different drugs being developed as a cardiovascular panacea for anyone over the age of 55). The Department of Health estimates that statins prevent about 10,000 early deaths every year, but a small and vocal group of sceptics believes that they are not as effective as claimed and that they cause a number of disabling side-effects" - Times