I’ve been following Nick Norwitz, MD/PhD, for a while now. He’s quite the researcher, that’s for sure. And his latest video covering his cholesterol situation is wild: I Bet My Life Against Cholesterol Dogma (And Won)

In the past Nick had severe inflammatory bowel disease, which altered his life significantly. At one point he dropped below 100 pounds, ended up in intensive care, and drove him to question his life. I totally understand. I’ve been there a few times myself. So, out of desperation he tried a therapeutic ketogenic diet, which sent his disease into full remission. Now, that fact alone isn’t supposed to be possible, but it’s actually the side story at the moment.

The real issue here turned out to be his cholesterol. As a result of that new diet, Nick’s LDL (low-density lipoprotein) climbed from a so-called healthy 90 to near 600, while his total cholesterol tapped out at 700! Under traditional medical science, those numbers represent an emergency right now and over time a death sentence from a heart attack or a stroke. Treatment was needed right away. But Nick made a different decision. As he says, for seven years he has been “running an experiment that should be killing me.” But he kept at it because “the thing that is causing my cholesterol to go so high is also saving my life.” That’s quite a position to be in. But it’s also one in which many people find themselves when dealing with two intractable medical conditions that doctors can’t simultaneously treat without side effects.

Since Nick’s been dealing with massive LDL for so long while also declining standard treatment with statin drugs, I was curious why he hadn’t yet gotten a cardiac calcium scan. Those scans are fast and relatively inexpensive. Why wouldn’t he want to check for plaque in his coronary arteries? It just seemed odd to me given how comprehensively he researches his own conditions.

Well, recently, he finally went ahead and got his scan. The result? Zero! No plaque at all! Personally, I wasn’t surprised because I’m familiar with his research, and I know others who have had similar results from similar conditions. But I’m sure he was relieved given his own history and also living with being attacked constantly for his unique approach. The result of zero plaque “doesn’t just poke a cholesterol dogma, it shatters it,” he says. It does, indeed. But medicine changes slowly. Perhaps in a hundred years or so the protocols will change to embrace new research. For now, though, he’ll likely remain an aberration, just like all the other aberrations out there. The difference here, though, is that Nick publishes prolifically, so he’s leaving a detailed scientific paper trail that other researchers are noticing.

Anyway, it’s a good story on its own for Nick’s gut and his heart. But the part I want to point to comes later when he steps back and explains why he thinks this happened. His argument concerns context. A single blood marker like cholesterol, or even height, only means something within a particular person’s situation. For example, Nick uses basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal to illustrate the point. Shaq is seven foot one because of lucky genes. But Nick says that other people could be the same height because of a tumor messing with their growth hormones while the tumor eventually quietly kills them. Same measurement, different reality. “Context is everything.”

Then Nick makes the point that stuck with me because I’ve experienced it many times myself dealing with the medical industrial complex. It’s a very real phenomenon. Modern medicine, he says, often misses context entirely when dealing with individual patients. The context of the person gets traded away for algorithms that let the system run efficiently at scale as it implements particular protocols or policies. And as much as individual doctors may want the best for their patients, and Nick believes they do, “modern medicine treats populations, not people.”

That’s the line right there. I got it right away. Experienced it many times. Painfully. Nick says that treatment protocols get built on averages drawn from large groups of mostly sick people. That may work well enough for most people most of the time to get them out of some acute condition or to enable them to live longer with a chronic condition. But it fails the outliers. These are the people whose numbers on one test look alarming for a reason the average never accounts for while their other markers are exceptionally healthy. In Nick’s case, that reason is high cholesterol driven by a therapeutic diet rather than any other known disease. He returns to the idea near the end and tells us this: “Don’t settle for being treated like the population average, because almost none of us are.” He’s right. But the “settle” bit is challenging because the medical community as a system isn’t so warm and fuzzy when confronted with people who question it.

There’s much more in the video. He briefly reviews his experiment where he added Oreo cookies to his diet that cut his cholesterol sharply, which he offers as an indicator that his fat-burning metabolism may be the real driver to his cholesterol markers breaking the established reference ranges. He also explains why he walked away from a traditional medical career to instead work as a medical communicator. On placing that bet against decades of established cardiology, he says, “The data judges the ideas, not the credentials backing them.” His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers now, so he’s touching more people on any given day than would be possible had he gone into clinical medicine.

Systems are built to scale. But they rarely consider individuals, especially individuals whose conditions don’t fit published protocols. That’s why it’s critical to always do your own research, question your doctor, and act in your own interest. The doctors may care about you to a certain degree, but the protocols they implement don’t.

Good luck!