There’s a researcher in town at Johns Hopkins who is developing a test on blood stickiness, which he and apparently some other researchers feel is a better indicator than cholesterol level. Have you heard anything about it? I was pretty interested in it (from a layman’s “I’d like to stay alive” standpoint), but Angell’s article has dashed the hopes of a lot of recent innovations I’ve read about. But at least there is some pockets of criticism of accepted protocol.

Aaron

The “medical establishment” is the subject of Balan’s post, or rather, their dishonesty, inaccuracy, immorality, and overconfidence. If you prefer to go by the guidelines of the AHA and the pharmaceutical cartel, you live in a free country that is perfectly suited to accommodate you. Every discovery is a departure from previously held notions, and is typically resisted by the “establishment”.

as you can see, you need to be careful with words.

“lower cholesterol is not the goal”

You will please forgive me if I find your statement literally incredible.

As everyone knows, I bought an insurance policy this fall – all they cared about was that number. I went to the doctor and the first thing he asked me was if I knew that number. Almost every gentleman of my acquaintance over 50 is obsessed with that number.

Many reputable health articles you read tell you to care about that number, and the American Heart Association is happy to tell you what it should be. Doctors care so much about that number they are now considering statins for children and suggest some cholesterol screening at the age of 2. If this number isn’t the goal, why is everyone fixated on it?

The only person who questions this fixation seems to be Gary Taubes, whose book has been discussed here. And he’s considered a lunatic by the medical establishment, apparently.

I can’t judge either way about acupuncture, ayurveda, or homeopathy. We lack evidence, NIH says. (If any of them are likely to work, I vote for the homeopathy, simply based on the fact that apparently many of the “medicines” are plant abstracts in brandy — brandy is always good for whatever ails ya.)

Why not just take a group of Park Avenue ladies, putting 1/4 on ayurveda, 1/4 on Lipitor, leaving 1/4 to spend time with their celebrity hairdresser (the ultimate New York authority figure who gives you individual attention), and abandoning the last quarter to their normal charity events? At the end of 1 year see which has the lower cholesterol.

Voila. There’s your NIH study right there – but seriously, why not a comparative survey of the treatments? If ayurveda gives you a “good enough” number as the Lipitor, who cares about the “distraction?”

Why protect the mystique of conventional medicine and doctor authority if I can get a similar number on the cheap? Especially if you’re gonna make us pay for their expensive Lipitor with our meager public purse.

“actually work”

Ok, let’s take. . .gosh, I dunno. . .ayurveda, so popular among rich ladies in New York right now. What does “actually work” mean in this context? You might argue that reviewing studies on cholesterol reduction, to see if say, an ayurvedic medicine with garlic or whatever reduces cholesterol would prove “working.”

But then we still run into the above “authority figure pays attention to me” issue. The ayurvedic doctor has an amazing office, all decorated in Indian silks, with beautiful Indian assistants serving chai or dosha(constitution)-appropriate teas.

He wears a fantastic white silk “spiritual” outfit and will listen to you talk for an hour. You will take a computerized test to determine your “individual” dosha, you will be prescribed a “unique” diet to follow, with a “unique” set of yoga exercises, then he will pour oil over your forehead, etc. etc. etc.

Finally, he will give you an herbal mix or pleasant tasting herbal-flavored ghee-candy paste (rasayana) to eat 2 times a day. And you have to come back in 6 months.

So maybe the garlic-guggul-arjuna butter-candy mix “actually” reduces cholesterol. I guess we could give it to people via mail order and see if their numbers go down. Or maybe all the lavish impressive “spiritual” attention and time with the yoga instructor does it.

Heck, maybe the power yoga alone does it, by increasing exercise. Maybe the diet does it alone, by weight loss.

The point is, does it matter in terms of health outcome which component of the ritual actually works?

I guarantee the giant tub of fennel-flavored sugared-butter with garlic, guggul and arjuna tastes great (for good patient compliance), and costs a mere US$150 a year, which is certainly cheaper than US$1,400 a year for Lipitor + US$400 for the cardiologist, even when you count in the US$200 initial office visit and the US$35 yoga video.

I think this is really important to figure out soon, in light of the coming US universal health care plan ($$$,$$$,$$$,$$$). It could be a useful component perhaps of Robin’s suggestion to cut medicine in half, while increasing people’s signal sense of “being cared for” by an expert of their choice.

frelkins, Here is another disclaimer that should probably be made whenever you’re talking about quackery:

“In principle, medicine should be open to anything that can be scientifically shown to work. If there is evidence that herbs or needles or whatever *actually work*, then they deserve to be a part of conventional medicine every bit as much as a drug developed in a lab. Furthermore, it is fair to point out that for-profit medicine has pretty strong reasons to ignore some possibly effective treatments: if it turns out that an apple a day really does keep the doctor away, drug companies would have every reason to suppress or ignore that fact. This should have the effect of: (i) making you support research funded by the government or by non-profit institutions; and (ii) lowering somewhat the evidentiary threshold an “alternative” treatment would have to clear before you bought into it. But this does *not* mean that you should just start believing any nonsense: there is still a lot of real quackery out there. And you should be highly skeptical of alternative medicine that markets itself mostly on the basis of citing quotes like the one in this post, and not on actual evidence that their treatments work.”