Paid with a credit card and now I am paranoid about privacy

LipidDoc_ATL said:

The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. The objection nobody has made: this only works if the measurement is doing what we assume it is doing, and that assumption has not been tested here.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. One habit that pays for itself: post the method alongside the number. A figure without its method cannot be checked, and an unchecked figure is how this community accumulates folklore.

Dr.CardioMD said:

The objection nobody has made: this only works if the measurement is doing what we assume it is doing, and that assumption has not been tested here.

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. Take it one variable at a time. Almost every unanswerable question in these threads is unanswerable because three things changed in the same fortnight, and no amount of subsequent argument can untangle them after the fact.

Following on from MariaRD — and this may be the naive question:

Did your prescriber agree with that reading, and if not what was their objection?

Reporting back.

For the archive: it took about six weeks rather than the two I expected, and the difference between those two numbers was the whole of my problem.