I do not regard the letter from Mr. Olds as hate mail. People can disagree about matters civilly,
though the slaughter of Americans will continue as long as guns are freely available to anyone with the
money to buy them. I and all of my brothers served in the Armed Forces to defend the right of free speech,
as did my father, who built bridges for MacArthur in WWII. And by the way, I was not referring to the
citizens of Wood County as low life’s – I know many of them personally and know that they are the salt of
the earth. I was referring to some of the people of the shoot-em-up Wild West a century ago.The letter from
Lloyd is another matter, and it speaks for itself. Lloyd refutes himself. However, I do want to clear up
something. I never did a double-blind controlled trial on my patients. I did a presentation on the
prevention of atherothrombotic disease (ATD) when I was in medical school at OSU in the late 1960s. That
spurred my interest in ATD prevention. So I started reading and trying to prevent ATD while I was in the
USAF and I continued to try to do the same when I got to BG in 1974.I knew that cholesterol was important,
but it was only one of about 25 risk factors. So I collected risk factor data and when I found
abnormalities, I offered treatment. Given the newness of this approach about 40 years ago, other physicians
in BG were not receptive of what I was doing – after all, I was treating cholesterol at levels of 250 mg/dl,
and they did not treat until levels of 300 mg/dl. (How things have changed! That’s what comes of being the
trailblazer, I guess.) Moreover, some patients were likewise often unwilling to take the treatment. My
"study" involved a chart review – not a formal study – of the natural history of ATD and ATD risk
factors. The world-famous Framingham Heart Study (FHS) taught us that the population of people who have ATD
events differ from the population that does not have ATD events. So I looked at the risk factor
constellations of those people who did and who did not have ATD events, just as FHS advised. All my work is
based on this, and it gives a better perspective on the prediction of the population at risk of ATD than is
available to university professors who do not have access to long-term databases. The work is observational,
not anecdotal, just as that of FHS.William E. Feeman Jr., M.D.Bowling Green