One of the goals of the treatment has been to raise the level of HDL -- good cholesterol.
You see, good cholesterol is kind of like Liquid Plumr. It comes along and cleans out the bad cholesterol that clogs up the pipes. This makes you healthier and at lower risk of heart disease.
Except it doesn't.
After decades of yelling at people to raise their levels of "good cholesterol" researchers have changed their minds. Now they claim "good cholesterol" -- as we used to say in Brooklyn -- don't do shit.
According to The New York Times...
...a new study that makes use of powerful databases of genetic information has found that raising HDL levels may not make any difference to heart disease risk. People who inherit genes that give them naturally higher HDL levels throughout life have no less heart disease than those who inherit genes that give them slightly lower levels.
So here's something to think about. Some marketing researchers and digi-gurus have been trying to convince us that their esoteric measurements of consumer online behavior correlate with ad effectiveness.Dr. Michael Lauer, director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, agreed. “The current study tells us that when it comes to HDL we should seriously consider going back to the drawing board..."
They are trying to sell us on the idea that the power of display advertising is not in its ability to generate clicks, but on crackpot measurements like "dwelling" and "lingering" and "mouse hovering." It's all very fascinating to people who were blown away by freshman psychology.
If it's taken real scientists with real test tubes and real peer review decades to figure out that HDL don't do shit, do you really think these marketing meatballs with their "mouse hovering" know anything about the effectiveness of display ads?
Please, don't make me laugh.
