Health Viewpoints
The four values on a standard cholesterol panel are mostly garbage. Total cholesterol is worthless. LDL cholesterol is not a real number, but a fictitious value with little relationship to reality and, at best, poor predictive value for cardiovascular events. Because reducing LDL cholesterol has become such a profitable enterprise for the pharmaceutical industry, this is the value that the majority of physicians focus on, bullying their patients into taking statin cholesterol drugs, even though their track record is, at best, spotty, providing little if any benefit to the majority while increasing risk for Type 2 diabetes, progressive muscular weakness, and cognitive impairment.
