Talk:Lipid hypothesis

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This article was nominated for deletion recently. The result of the discussion was Keep.

[edit] Spelling

Seeing how I misspelled it and it is more commonly called the cholesterol hypothesis I agree the best way forward would be to delete the article. Apologies to any mods/admins for the extra work! --Starquin 13:18, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Ha, I hadn't even noticed the misspelling in the title. Moved to "hypothesis." With the change to NPOV article text, this is a perfectly legitimate article. It has a significant number of hits in Google, so it's deserving of an article. I'll leave it to people who know what they're talking about to make it more than a stub. eaolson 14:28, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

According to the AfD discussion, this is a nonneutral term. It's used by one side in the debate to convey a particular POV. We can still have an article about it, but, like other such articles (e.g., Chickenhawk (politics)), this one must make clear that the term proceeds from a particular orientation. I've rewritten it along those lines. JamesMLane t c 10:55, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

"Lipid hypothesis" is a term used in peer-reviewed scientific literature describing a hypothesis proposed by Virchow in 1856. As such, it is a perfectly valid scientific term and the article could have a section on the development of the hypothesis from a science history perspective. As scientific hypotheses go, they make testable predictions that can be proven or disproven by studies. Therefore, the article should contain a section on studies that have been done to address this question. In the case of the lipid hypothesis, controversial discussion started in the 1970s and 1980s that questioned the interpretation of data that some scientists consider to be solid proof of the lipid hypothesis. This could be worked into a controversy section. It appears that the term was "hijacked" into this discussion by people arguing that the "proof" for the hypothesis is flawed and unscientific and therefore it is still nothing but a theory, but that doesn't change the validity of the term itself.

What this article needs is solid, scientific references from peer-reviewed publications. There are scientific papers that question the lipid hypothesis, but from what I can tell right now, they appear to be mostly single-author review papers written by one person in the scientific community whose main point of argument is that other scientists and NIH are working unscientifically and misinterpreting the data. As such, I feel the controversy section should not be the main part of the article as it does not reflect "mainstream" view. The critical articles are counter-balanced by a number of reviews detailing proof for the lipid hypothesis, which should be part of the article as well, if not its main body.

Looking over the article history, I have to agree that apparently this article was originally created on Wikipedia to support a certain POV. I do believe though that it could be worked into a neutral and informative article about a 150-year-old scientific hypothesis that became a controversial topic towards the end of the 20th century. The article should aim at allowing readers to understand the data produced in studies based on predictions made by the hypothesis and form an educated opinion about its conflicting interpretations. - tameeria 16:57, 27 February 2007 (UTC)