Muscle complaints on statin therapy are common, and most of them are not dangerous. The nursing skill is distinguishing the ordinary from the serious without frightening the patient off effective treatment. ### Mild muscle symptoms Aches, stiffness or mild soreness can occur. They warrant assessment, not alarm. Consider what else might explain them: unaccustomed exercise, a recently added interacting medication, untreated hypothyroidism, declining renal function, or a musculoskeletal cause entirely unrelated to the statin. Not every ache is rhabdomyolysis, and treating it as though it were leads to patients abandoning therapy that was protecting them. ### The concerning pattern What changes the picture is the combination: significant muscle pain or weakness *plus* dark urine, with or without systemic illness That combination suggests clinically significant muscle injury with myoglobin appearing in the urine, and it needs prompt medical assessment and urgent laboratory evaluation. Objective weakness — genuine difficulty rising from a chair or climbing stairs, rather than subjective soreness — is a particularly important finding. ### The RN role - take a proper symptom history: onset, distribution, severity, relation to starting...