Low LDL cholesterol alone doesn't prevent heart disease, yet medicine has narrowed its focus to lowering it with drugs. The speaker compares this to waiting for lung cancer before advising smokers to quit, arguing the approach ignores broader health and violates the principle of first doing no harm.
Why wait to tell a smoker to stop smoking only once they develop lung cancer? In this analogy, not lowering LDL cholesterol with pharmacotherapy is equivalent to smoking. By extension of this analogy, it's like me saying everybody should just get total colectomies, have their colons removed, because of risk of colon cancer. When did medicine become so myopically focused on lowering LDL cholesterol to the exclusion of overall patient health? What happened to first do no harm and careful risk-benefit analysis? This is absurd.
