I see it every week in my practice: Patients obsessed with their cholesterol numbers. LDL, HDL, triglycerides, the full alphabet soup. They have been trained to believe these numbers hold the keys to life and death.

But here is something I cannot stop thinking about: When you look under the microscope, an atherosclerotic plaque (the thing that clogs arteries and leads to heart attacks) looks an awful lot like a tuberculosis …

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I am an internist and, once upon a time, a card-carrying lipidologist. I have spent years watching medicine’s “standards of care” quietly stretch like elastic waistbands. What begins as a targeted therapy for a small group of high-risk patients slowly expands until everyone and their grandmother is expected to be on it. That phenomenon has a name: guideline creep.

How it works

The cycle is simple:

• A landmark trial shows benefit in …

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