The Cholesterol Alarmists
are, to many people, scammers. On the other hand, many believe the oft-repeated claims that cholesterol is a health hazard. As we know, cholesterol is manufactured by the liver. Somehow, the liver knows how much cholesterol to produce, and works steadily away every hour of every day.
The liver makes many other chemicals the body needs. No one knows everything the liver does, but livers have long been thought to be important, a conclusion that’s validated by the fact that the organ wouldn’t have a name indicating what an important part of life it is if it weren’t.
One wonders how the liver knows what quantity of cholesterol it should produce. Either it follows instructions embedded deeply within itself, or obeys its brain’s instructions, or our livers acts as loose cannons, uncontrollably blasting out deadly amounts of cholesterol. Some think it prudent to consider that our liver actually is working according to the genetic dictates of our body and its own, individual design.
Medical experts have long known that people like to be better and enjoy feeling that they are “helping themselves”, in some way, to “be better”. The insecure are the most easily convinced that, if told that there is a “perfect level of cholesterol”, they can be easily convinced to attempt to attain it, even if it means voluntarily ingesting chemicals that will destroy and weaken the ability to perform the complicated processes that their own livers were programmed and built to do.
It’s an axiom of business that those who are both prosperous and insecure are the perfect targets for every manifestation of vanity. Nowhere are the profits to be made from such people greater than in medicine, where purchases are paid for by “free” money from various insurance companies. So, the cholesterol targets are those who imagine themselves to be the people we see on TV ads selling the various liver-destroying chemicals; prosperous, well-insured older men who appear to have successfully overcome every possible insecurity by having obtained all the products and appearances necessary for success, (each of which has, by a similar process, been been made to seem desirable by a wide range of skilled marketers and manipulators from others in the vanity businesses).
Few things are more enjoyable than being at a party, and listening to people who believe that people who work for Pfizer or Merck know more about what their livers should be doing than do their own livers. “My doctor says that Lipitor has the fewest side effects.”, one such fatuous boob will say. “Oh, no. My doctor prefers Crestor.”, another will reply, each looking amazingly, even profoundly, serious about what they are saying. All those within earshot (in fact, a commercial like this may be filmed at a party, with something similar to this very conversation going on) are listening intently (the audience at home is identifying, as they are meant to, with those listening to the speakers at the party).
“This is important.”, members of both audiences say to themselves, each wanting to appear to be both concerned and intelligent, wishing only that their own doctors would have provided them with similar information to allow their own desire to make important pronouncements at parties to be as easily fulfilled as the two fans of their own liver-destroying medications. To attain that end, they resolve then and there to actually find out what their doctor does think, simply so that they may have the joy of participating in future discussions of similar import.
Indeed, the commercials may have succeeded in putting that very thought in their easily filled minds. “I think I’ll ask my doctor what I should take to lower my cholesterol.”, they say to themselves, nodding in affirmation as they do so, believing the thought to have independently appeared within their minds.
Their doctors whose opinions are being quoted, of course, have been “blitzed” by cholesterol-lowering “science” for years, even decades. They are not about to be left behind. Each of them has learned, often at free seminars in exotic locations, how important it is to “keep cholesterol at the ideal level”. Few of them notice that the “ideal level” has been dropping for years, as the profits that come from destroying livers need to be boosted, thereby requiring larger amounts of liver-destroying chemicals. Lurking behind the spiels for statin drugs is the ominous thought, “If I don’t help as many of my patients as possible to destroy their livers, I may be sued for malpractice.”
