Your doctor has bought into the cholesterol myth and you are a victim of the drug companies solutions. Cholesterol does build up in arteries, but not because of cholesterol, but because of inflammation. Cholesterol is the body's natural way of repairing tissues like the arteries. It is a lipid protein. If you reduce your intake of cholesterol producing foods, your body will compensate by making more cholesterol in your liver. Your body needs cholesterol, so it knows this and makes more when you don't get enough in your diet. Liptor causes your liver to not produce as much cholesterol. This stops or greatly reduces the body's ability to repair damaged arteries. Yes, it reduces the cholesterol in the arteries, but now the body cannot fix the real problem because it has just not been addressed. This leaves you susceptible to stroke because your arteries are still being damaged by inflammation, the real culprit. Did your doctor tell you this? Did he also tell you that pattern 2 LDL cholesterol is the one that gets stuck in the arteries, not pattern 1 LDL cholesterol that is necessary for repairing tissue? The real culprit in all this is inflammation, not cholesterol. If you reduce the inflammation, your body will not build up with cholesterol. There is a nano bacteria that is found in cooked foods and processed foods that is so tiny, it doesn't show up in lab tests and was discovered by the University of California at Irvine and the University of Pennsylvania. This bacteria gets into the body and attacks 3 primary areas, the heart & it's arteries, pancreas, and kidneys. When the pattern 2 LDL cholesterol oxidizes and gets wedged into small nooks and cranny's, calcium surrounds the bacteria that has bored into the layers of the arteries to create "hardening of the arteries." Cholesterol is just trying to do it's job it was designed for. To limit it's production and ignore the "root cause" is to put a band aide on the problem and make you dependent upon the drugs and keep you sick, but hanging on without solving the real problem. Your body is designed to kill this nano bacteria, but it requires good stomach acid to do so. As you age, and eat processed foods, cooked foods, etc., your body produces less and less stomach acid. By the time you are 70, you are only producing about less than 5% of the stomach acid you did at 25. This means that you are starving yourself to death because most of your food is not getting digested and the anti-bacterial action of stomach acid is just not there as it used to be, making you susceptible to giving free ride for those bad bacteria to destroy your heart, arteries, pancreas, and kidneys, while doctors try to treat the symptoms, leaving you sick. Just not a pretty picture, but the drug companies are making lots of money on this one. The real problem you are facing now is that as your blood pressure gets less and less due to the blockages, your kidneys are going to interpret that you are becoming dehydrated. This will cause the kidneys to start shutting down to preserve water as they are designed to do. This will cause you to build up fluids in your body and set you up for a Congestive Heart Failure scenario. Not a good thing. If I were you, I would concentrate on going after those "root causes" that are creating the problem. When you rid yourself of those inflammations, your cholesterol issue should change. As it does, you will be able to slowly get off those medications. It's important to work with your doctor as best you can to do this. Doctors typically resist this information because they are not trained to understand "root causes" of disease, just symptoms and what drug should be prescribed. There are herbs that can help and stomach acid that you can take to increase your digestion to keep more of those bacteria out of your body and also start reducing the stored fat. I suggest you locate a Certified Nutritional Therapist that can test you for specific nutritional deficiencies and can tell exactly how much of the nutrients your body needs. They can help you with diets that will make you healthy. Doctors are the wrong people to assist you with diets, they have NO training in nutrition and generally listen to the media for their information that is loaded with misinformation. good luck to you