Humans Make Terrible Lab Rats – And Why the Latest Cholesterol Wonder Drug Should Make You Pause
- Gary Moller
- 27 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Introduction
A slick new headline has been circulating — a "breakthrough" cholesterol-lowering pill called Enlicitide, tested on people with familial hypercholesterolaemia and showing a dramatic 60 percent drop in LDL cholesterol. The study is in JAMA. The press releases are triumphant. Many are ready to declare it the next miracle in cardiovascular medicine.
But before anyone rushes to swallow another once-a-day chemical, let’s take a sober look at the realities hidden beneath the glossy numbers.
Humans make terrible lab rats
And the more complex our lives, our bodies, and our medical exposures become, the less reliable short-term drug trials really are.
The first truth: humans are not controlled organisms
A lab rat lives in a tightly controlled environment. Identical genetics. Identical food. Identical light cycles. Identical stressors. Identical everything.
Humans live in chaos.
We are shaped by:
Unique genetics
Varying gut microbiomes
Nutrient deficiencies
Past infections
Emotional trauma
Chronic stress
Varying exercise levels
Industrial food
Environmental toxins
Sleep disruption
Sedentary lifestyles
Hormonal shifts
Metabolic strain
Trying to run a clean, predictive drug trial on humans is like trying to tune a piano during an earthquake.
This fundamental mismatch makes humans unsuitable for precise pharmaceutical experimentation. Yet the modern system pretends otherwise.
Polypharmacy - The Great Medicinal Headache Of Our Times
Layer polypharmacy on top — and the whole idea collapses.
The Enlicitide trial provides a perfect case study.
Every participant was already taking lipid-lowering drugs — statins, ezetimibe, or both. They were required to stay on their existing medications throughout the trial. And, being typical adults with metabolic and cardiovascular risk, many would also have been taking drugs for thyroid issues, hypertension, diabetes, anxiety, HRT, prostate enlargement, reflux, chronic pain, sleep problems, allergies, and so on.
In other words, this was not a clean baseline. This was a complex biochemical polypharaceutical swamp that not even the most powerful computers, with the help of AI could ever hope to decipher.
Now drop a brand-new PCSK9 inhibitor into that swamp and try to work out which symptom belongs to which chemical. It is scientifically impossible.
And this impossibility appears immediately in the trial results:
75 to 80 percent of participants in both the Enlicitide and placebo groups reported adverse events. Not surprising — both groups were already on multiple medications, all with their own side-effect profiles.
Subtle harm? Invisible.
Cumulative harm? Invisible.
Long-term harm? Invisible.
Interactions? Certainly present, but impossible to decipher.
Clinical trials are not built to detect slow-burn problems. They are built to detect short-term numerical success.
PCSK9 inhibition is not a harmless tweak
PCSK9 is not a simple cholesterol switch. It is involved in immune signalling, inflammation, receptor recycling, lipid trafficking, and tumour defence. Blocking it may lower LDL dramatically — and yes, it does — but it also alters biological systems well beyond lipids.
Short-term trials cannot tell you what happens when you block PCSK9 for five, ten, or twenty years in millions of stressed, inflamed, ageing humans with inconsistent diets, poor sleep, and a medicine cabinet full of pharmaceuticals.
But the trial still proclaims "well tolerated".
This is marketing language, not biological certainty.
mRNA Vaccines
And now we add the biggest unspoken variable of all: the mRNA vaccine era
If we think most trial participants had just had the recent mRNA COVID injections, then another big change comes into play.
These injections were released under Emergency Use Authorisation. They leap-frogged the usual decade-long safety testing pipeline in favour of compressed timelines. They are based on an entirely new platform that:
Induces immune activation
Engages inflammatory pathways
Uses lipid nanoparticles
Produces spike protein within host cells
Alters cytokine signalling
Behaves differently across individuals
Whether one loves them or questions them is irrelevant here. The point is clinical, not political:
They altered the biological baseline of the population.
When you introduce a new immune treatment that uses genes in millions of people, then test new drugs with it, your trial assumptions fall apart.
Interactions? Unknown.
Long-term immune impacts? Unknown.
Lipid metabolism interactions? Unknown.
Endothelial or inflammatory effects? Unknown.
Drug–drug–immune pathway interactions? Nobody has mapped them.
No trial controlled for this.
They couldn't — the data doesn't exist yet.
So now we're testing Enlicitide on bodies that may already be:
Inflamed
Immune-primed
Exhausted
Metabolically altered
Hormonally disrupted
Dysregulated in autonomic function (as seen in some post-vaccination cases)
Or recovering from repeated viral exposures
This makes the human body an even worse experimental animal than it already was.
Clinical trials test fantasy humans. Real drugs are given to real humans
Drug trials remove:
The elderly
The frail
The multi-medicated
The inflamed
The nutrient-deficient
The chronically sick
The immune-altered
The stressed and sleep-deprived
Those with multiple conditions
In other words, they remove nearly everyone who will eventually be prescribed the drug.
Once a drug enters the real world, biology behaves differently — and far more unpredictably — than in the polished clinical trial bubble.
If you treated lab rats this way — fed them industrial food, gave them eight medications, added novel gene-based treatments, deprived them of sleep, filled their environment with plastics, and stressed them continuously — no ethics committee would approve the experiment.
But when do humans endure this?
We simply call it healthcare.
The long history of wonder drugs that weren't:
Thalidomide.
Fen-phen.
Certain hormone therapies.
COX-2 painkillers.
Multiple psychiatric medications.
Various cardiovascular agents.
mRNA vaccines.
All of them arrived with shiny data, glowing reviews, and confident claims.
All of them revealed their true nature only after years in the wild.
Caution is Wise
This is why wise physicians rely on older drugs — not because they are stuck in their ways, but because older medications have scars. Their strengths and dangers are known. They have lived long enough in real humans for truth to emerge.
The latest wonder drug is an untested tiger that just happens to be purring today.
The Freeranger View
Honour complexity, trust biology, be careful with chemicals
My position, shaped by fifty-plus years in natural health and sports medicine, is simple:
Humans heal best when given what nature intended — nutrient-rich food, sunlight, movement, minerals, clean water, sleep, and resilience.
Pharmaceuticals have their place, but that place is far narrower than modern medicine admits.
New drugs must prove themselves over decades before they earn trust.
Polypharmacy is one of the greatest unresolved dangers in contemporary health.
mRNA-era biology adds another unpredictable layer to drug interactions.
No trial can simulate real-world human complexity.
We should intervene gently, not aggressively, unless the situation truly warrants it.
Whenever a pharmaceutical promises a miracle, my first thought isn't excitement. It's caution:
Has this drug been tested on real humans for long enough for nature to reveal the truth?
If the answer is no — and with Enlicitide, the answer is certainly no — then it belongs in the "approach carefully" category.
Conclusion
Humans make terrible lab rats.
But they make excellent self-healing organisms — when we stop interrupting that process with untested chemical enthusiasm.
Medical disclaimer: This article is for general information and should not replace personalised medical advice. Always consult a qualified health professional before changing medications or treatment plans.
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