If your doctor gets stroppy about your numbers, send him or her a few links to presentations by David and Jen Unwin. You can use Dave Feldman’s protocol to manipulate your lipid numbers, but he doesn’t really like it when people use the protocol to lie to their doctors, and I understand his reasoning.
If you don’t manipulate your lipids, your doctor is required by NICE guidelines to prescribe a statin for LDL above a certain level, but you are not required to take the drug, or even to get the prescription filled, as I understand U.K. law. Another link to perhaps go armed with is the video of Aseem Malhotra’s presentation to Parliament, in which he discusses how overprescribed statins are and the side effects they can cause. He also mentioned some of his clinical experiences with improved health from de-prescribing statins.
It is worth noting, by the way, that Professor Sir Rory Collins, the Oxford researcher who controls all the statin study data on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, simultaneously maintains that statins cause no side effectts, while profiting from the royalties yielded by a genetic test that detects whether a patient is likely to suffer from side effects of taking a statin.
P.S.—David Diamond has numerous videos on YouTube of his various presentations on statins and the cholesterol myth. They are entertainingly delivered and solidly backed by scientific data. His exposé of the statistical manipulations used by statin manufacturers to claim benefits for their products is very helpful. He, Malcolm Kendrick, Uffe Ravnskov, Michel de Lorgeril, and other internationally respected researchers have published, jointly and severally, a number of papers discussing these statistical shenanigans and disputing the relevance of cholesterol levels to assessing cardiovascular risk. (Most of these papers can be found on PubMed, by the way.)