Cholesterol and Bloodletting
From Research Translation Podcast by David Newman
March 20, 2026 · 27 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the historical context of bloodletting in medicine and parallels it with contemporary views on cholesterol and cardiovascular risk factors.
In the early 19th century, the French physician Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis did something medicine had rarely done before: he counted. At the time, bloodletting was standard. It was elegant, logical, and universally accepted. If an imbalance of humors caused disease, removing blood should fix it. The theory made sense. The practice was everywhere. Louis compared outcomes among patients with pneumonia who were bled early and aggressively to those who were not, and found that bloodletting didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse. That single act—placing belief next to data—began to unravel one of medicine’s most entrenched practices, forcing doctors to confront a dangerous possibility: a treatment can be coherent, widely accepted, and completely wrong. Now, imagine if the medical establishment had ignored that finding, and doubled down—expanding bloodletting to younger and healthier people. That is where we are with cholesterol. In March of last year, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper that should have ignited a revolution. Spanning millions of participants, hundreds of cohorts, and decades of follow-up, it is the largest and most comprehensive study…
People in this episode
Host: David Newman
Topics covered
- cholesterol
- bloodletting
- cardiovascular risk
- medical history
- evidence-based medicine
Keywords
- cholesterol
- bloodletting
- Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis
- cardiovascular risk
- Lipid Hypothesis
- evidence-based medicine
- medical history
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: New England Journal of Medicine
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