Cholesterol

The newspapers need to append little layman's descriptions to scientific words. Science is leading the country by such a wide margin that if they don't, nobody will know what they mean. The big pair these days is "good cholesterol" and "bad cholesterol". Those designations follow every instance of "HDL" and "LDL" in every newspaper. I bet Word auto-corrects it for you.

Why does this remind me of the four humors ? Do good cholesterol and bad cholesterol affect your mood differently? This is the modern age. Maybe people with high levels of good cholesterol post videos to YouTube and take lots of digital camera photos. Or bad cholesterol makes you talk on your cell phone all the time and browse Facebook. It's already known that high levels of LDL give you heart attacks. Wikipedia says low levels of cholesterol cause "depression, cancer, and cerebral hemmorage," so clearly it is important to keep these humors in balance too.

If we operate on this 6-humor model, what medical treatments are there? We already had fasting, bleeding, purging and enemas. (Can you lower your phlegm levels by blowing your nose?) Obviously you can lower your Bad Cholesterol levels by dieting. That's a technique that has been known since the nineteenth century, although they did not know how it fit into the humor framework. I'm not sure how you lower Good Cholesterol levels. Perhaps normal dieting reduces your Bad Cholesterol levels and Atkins dieting reduces your Good Cholesterol levels. That would explain how they both got inexplicably popular at the same time; they work on different humors. On the other hand, maybe the way to treat high Good Cholesterol levels is something else. Candidates include spinal taps, nose picking, or Q-tips.