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Article Excerpt
What is normal?
The shifting boundaries of normal and healthy cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and other health indicators.
It seems that the definitions of normal, healthy levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and other health indicators keep changing, so that increasing numbers of people are classified as being at risk and therefore in need of treatment. Yesterday's normal becomes today's needs-to-be-treated.
More than a few people have wondered why the bar keeps moving, and whether standards change just so doctors, laboratories, and other health care providers can generate more business for themselves. Doctors and others in health care aren't immune to the pursuit of self-interest, but there's a better, fuller explanation for the migrations of normal.
Normal does not equal healthy
For any medical test, normal is initially defined after taking measurements in thousands of apparently healthy people. The result is usually a bell-shaped curve, in which the most frequently found values are in the middle of the curve and the lowest and highest values, which occur in just a small percentage of people, are in the tail ends.
Somewhat...
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