I'm not a doctor of medicine; my course (experimental physics methods; basically something where they learn something approximating general diagnosis skills) wa

I'm not a doctor of medicine; my course (experimental physics methods; basically something where they learn something approximating general diagnosis skills) was a weeder for medical students. I am in abundant agreement with you that some doctors are amazing and some are cabbage brained imbeciles. The point I'm trying to make here is that for squishy complex chronic conditions like hyperlipidemia, I don't think even the very good ones are well equipped to know what they're talking about unless they spend a lot of time reviewing the literature (and even then, if they act on it, they may be voiding their malpractice insurance terms among other things). T-tests on the differences in outcomes are fairly difficult to interpret for researchers; it's impossible to eyeball and make sense of it with the samples a GP is exposed to. There's all kinds of confounding bias as well; they don't see people who don't go to the doctor, have the condition (such as it is) and do fine without any intervention. As such, they basically stick with the prevailing ideology. And they get this ideology wrong all the time. It's not their fault; it's just how the world works. For myself, I build in a discount term for doctor advice based on what the issue is. Basically if doctors are provably good at treating an illness; I will shut my cake hole and obey. If they're not, I'm at least going to dig into the literature. FWIIW an anecdote for you: Andy Sessler, the former director of LBNL developed a brain tumor while running the place. He had access to the very best treatment in the world, including the Bevatron proton bombardment technique, but he chose to adopt some kind of macrobiotic diet and take up running (founding the LBNL runaround in the process). I think the tumors eventually killed him; 35 years after he was diagnosed. I didn't know him beyond seeing him around at seminars and runarounds and such, but I assume his gamble was based on a deep understanding of how the stats on the disease treatments played out.