Science-Based Medicine

“As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that Lyme spirochetes survive a course of standard antibiotics” QFT. While PTLDS is a real thing (being long-term sequelae to the original Lyme infection), be very wary of anything labeled “chronic lyme”, which is a common code-word concoction of “Lyme-literate” MDs/DOs, naturopaths, and other quacks for peddling their nostrums (including permanent courses of antibiotics; a great way to make anyone sick as a dog). https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=lyme -- Bonus irony: GSK actually created a successful vaccine against Lyme 30 years ago: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-… No prizes for guessing who destroyed that.

Science based medicine is a great site. https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

One good way to self-educate on medical research in general is to read the Science-Based Medicine group blog http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ regularly. My single favorite link to share in a Hacker News comment is the article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research. http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html Check each news story you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the story.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=5166 This is a great article from the sciencebasedmedicine guys about the state of dichloroacetate as a cancer treatment. A bit long-winded, but totally realistic about the current prospects. The links at the bottom are all great too.

The placebo effect is overstated and misunderstood by many. Further, using the placebo effect to treat sick people is unethical and ineffective. It should not be available through pharmacies. For a greater and more educated discussion on the placebo effect (by a respected neurologist) please see: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=24

Ethics are not ridiculous. Randomized placebo controlled double-blinded studies have the potential to cause harm to humans. A fantastic post on the issue can be found here http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=467

> Is it even realistic for an average joe to look into it in their free time, and come to a useful conslusion in a realistic timeframe, or is everything so complicated nowadays that it's not worth it? In my personal opinion, no it isn’t. I would say that it would be useful to look into how scientific and medical research is conducted, how peer review works, etc. and you will see the incredible complexity and difficulty of building up a medical theory. I’d also look at skeptic explanations of how pseudoscience uses that complexity to push things that just aren’t true. Without a deep understanding of topic, and all the underlying scientific method, you are far more likely to come to a wrong conclusion than a correct one. Finding good scientific communicators, I’ve found, is the best way to get good information. People that do have the requisite knowledge and that will contextualize the sensational and just bad reporting of science and medicine. I would suggest Science Based Medicine [1] and Heathcare Triage [2] as a start. [1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/thehealthcaretriage

My bad, I thought all the articles on SBM were written by the same person. In any event, I stand by my claim that a lot of the articles on the site are crap. Just look at the article you referenced, which says that calling out pharma industry shills is just a "means of smearing those [...] who have the temerity to ask them to provide scientific studies to back up their assertions." And yet if you look at their article on the efficacy of antidepressants, the author says the meta-study showing that antidepressants are no better than placebos for mild and moderate depression is invalid because it excluded studies where the researchers wouldn't provide their data: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3722#more-3722 Double standard much? The author also criticizes the decision not to include studies that excluded placebo responders. WTF? The whole point of the study was to compare the effectiveness of antidepressants to placebos. How is it that SBM can advocate the use of antidepressants despite the lack of evidence of efficacy and the tons of evidence of dangerous side effects, whereas about medical marijuana they say that, "it’s hard to envision any situation in which prescribing marijuana would be ethical." I've read dozens of articles from that site, and the scientific rigor of their thinking seems to be limited at best.

I strongly disagree with your recommendations for Campbell and Robbins (and I assume you mean John Robbins, not Tim Robbins). Like most nutritionists, they do agree on eliminating refined carbohydrates and processed foods from your diet. But these two specifically argue that saturated fats are unhealthy and low-fat diets are optimal, the exact opposite of the thesis of the study and article. Robbins is a dietary extremist and his books make Quackwatch's list of non-recommended books that "promote misinformation, espouse unscientific theories, and/or contain unsubstantiated advice" [1]. The National Council Against Health Fraud even had a critical blurb towards his television program about Diet For a New America in their '91 newsletter [2]. While I find Campbell's actual research in the china studies important, the book infers much more than the studies showed, not to mention a lack of supporting follow-up studies that control for the most common criticisms (genetics, rates of exercise, comparisons with mostly meat-eating populations without diseases of civilization, etc.). I have a real issue with taking descriptive information from data and turning it into prescriptive advice before accumulating sound evidence. For a good critique, the always awesome SkepDoc Harriet Hall posted a review on the Science-Based Medicine blog (which I highly recommend) [3], although the comments get bogged down about her linking to a similar criticism by the Weston Price foundation. Oddly…

Amen Clinics have been covered on sciencebasedmedicine.org a few times (2008 and 2013) from the look of it. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/spect-scans-at-the-amen-clinic-a-new-… https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dr-amens-love-affair-with-spect-scans… Both https://sciencebasedmedicine.org and https://theness.com/neurologicablog/ are good resources for detailed research into science and medicine. With Neurologica having some good deep dives into Neuroscience topics https://theness.com/neurologicablog/category/neuroscience/ as the author is a recently retired academic clinical neurologist

There really isn't any. > What the current data shows is that there is a potential of neurotoxicity from fluoride at high levels, significantly higher than in the drinking water. But the same data shows, if anything, the managed drinking water levels are safe. Further, the best quality evidence does not show any clinical effect. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/fluoride-and-iq/

I agree that this proposed regulation seems like it probably won't help. Defining what counts as an ultra-processed food is challenging, and the actual causal link to health outcomes is far from clear. This article from Science-Based Medicine makes a good case against this kind of thing.[0] What can we actually do to make people eat healthier though? Rising obesity rates are one of those societal problems where I'm not sure what the solution is. The best strategy I can think of is something like "do our best to solve poverty and hope that this helps with obesity as well". [0] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ultraprocessed-foods/

> Early detection of growths is great because it saves lives and lets patients get treatment when it's more effective. It also gets people treatment when none was required: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-skeptical-look-at-screening-tests/ ETA: this is the page I was looking for actually: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-early-detection-of-cancer-and-imp…

They do love to cite studies but there aren't any studies that back up their claims and not RCTs of their methods at all. Here's a good overview https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/aafp-functional-medicine-lacks-suppor…

They weren't in the medical literature. The 10k prediction was in STAT news (https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coro… (note: it wasn't a hard prediction, but he seems to treat it as the best estimate based on the data at the time). The 40K prediction was quoted in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/without-mass-testing-were-flyi… There's a good summary with additional links, quotes, and commentary here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/10000-deaths/

People had pointed out how stupid his proposal was when he made it, and he ignored them completely. At that point, he was just a crank (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/jlockdowns/). The debate was never censored: he was allowed to communicate with policy makers if he had any evidence to support his proposal. What was censored (or rather, not promoted to people who weren't his followers) was his wild rants to fellow Christian libertarians who believe the invisible hand of the free market is the gentle hand of the baby Jesus himself, which we should not shackle with regulations. Slowing some children's development (while drastically accelerating others' because they were tutored by their parents who had to stay at home with them) is not even on the same scale as mass deaths and people dying outside hospitals due to lack of capacity.

I am no expert just a curious outsider, so take this with a large grain of salt, but it is my understanding that that’s one of the most pernicious misconceptions even in practicing psychologists, but that the current high quality research suggests the learning styles theory is flawed at best and wrong at worst. This article is ~8 years old but I don’t think anything has quantitatively changed the conclusions over the intervening years. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-based-learning-myth-versus-real…

Have you ever tried it? I've found it to be really effective for anxiety and other things, though I'm not a hardcore practitioner. Even though it sounds like hippie bullshit, he accidentally stumbled onto a huge body hack to control his autonomous nervous system. It has also been validated in studies. It's also impossible to ignore all the extreme cold things he's done without getting frostbite. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/wim-hof-the-iceman/ This guy went to go debunk him, but instead ended up following the method and climbed a mountain with him in winter in the nude. https://www.fitdadnation.com/scott-carney/

If you understand how these court cases are brought you would see that it’s problematic at best to rely on them as a determination of truth: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-behind-the-roundup-lawsui…

I’m glad you’re feeling better, but it’s worth pointing out to everyone else that food sensitivity tests are total bullshit. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/igg-food-intolerance-tests-continue-t…

It's great the author learnt a lot about themselves and is feeling better. I was quite surprised to see that they wanted to try "cupping" though, which is well documented as pseudo-science snake oil and sometimes even extremely harmful. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/cupping-olympic-pseudoscience/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/05/13/the-ridiculous-…

That article was written by long time conspiracy theorist Kris Newby. Newby is the producer of a propaganda documentary for "chronic Lyme" called Under Our Skin, and also spreads conspiracy theories about bioweapons: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-review-of-under-our-skin-a-cult-cla… https://theconversation.com/no-lyme-disease-is-not-an-escaped-military… The article itself is about in vitro experiments funded by other chronic lyme conspiracy theorists. It has nothing to do with human disease.

More on the author of and theory in this paper, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26791784: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bart_Classen, https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19-vaccines-caus… And a meta-point for OP: the web site which presented this paper to you (with no disclaimers or context) may not have your best interest at heart. At best, that source is doing little or no due diligence. At worst, that source is intentionally misleading. HTH.

I recommend the Meyerowitz-Katz and Merone survey of IFR [1] over Ioannidis. The tl;dr is an IFR estimate 0.68%. Consensus in the epidemiology community is that Ioannidis has become a politicized hack, consistently pushing lowball estimates. Of course, your argument is still valid even with the lower estimate, I just think it becomes more complicated. Unfortunately, this case is quite a bit more complicated because COVID fatalities are heavily weighted to older ages, while this purported VIPIT is appearing largely in younger, otherwise healthy people. [1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v4 [2]: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-john-ioanni…

Besides that study just being in vitro (which is promising, but far from conclusive), the concentrations they needed to have an effect were really high: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromyc… > I also note that the half-maximal effective concentration (EC50) for blocking viral replication in vitro was 1.13 μM and the half-cytotoxic concentration (CC50) was greater than 100 μM. These are high concentrations for a drug, especially the CC50.

Yea it seems like this person has a history of potentially controversial claims and not always the best science [0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devra_Davis#controversies [1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-disconnect-between-cell-phone-fears…

Very mixed bag of the sources, several that look less than scientifically viable at a first glance (not judging whether they may have value along other dimensions). Others look more thorough/mainstream, like the very first one [0]. It would be interesting if someone who knows something about the field could evaluate how much this is worth paying attention to. [0] https://mpkb.org/home/publications/heil_immunologic_2016 EDIT: Wait, is this a trolling/hoax paper? 'A case series of 64 patient-reported outcomes subsequent to use of a silver-threaded cap designed to protect the brain and brain stem from microwave Electrosmog resulted in 90 % reporting "definite" or "strong" changes in their disease symptoms.' I should have checked first, this is posted on the author's own page. Here's someone assessing his ideas: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-marshal-protocol/

I am stepping in it a bit here, but I feel you should not be basing your diet on the China Study. It is pretty thoroughly discredit IMO. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/385/ Eat lots of vegetables and emulate blue zone diets and life style. It’s the best we got for a blue print of healthy living.

Something about this smells fishy. Informing that [Chronic Lyme as a concept is dubious at best](https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/fake-diagnoses-not-fake-diseases/), this sounds a lot like people worried about "whole-body Candida infections" or Wi-Fi poisoning or whatnot. Even if the symptoms are real, they could be a result from the nocebo effect or some other untreated illness. All of this on top of medium blogs being able to be made by anybody sets off my pseudo-science alarms.

There is no formal certification process for "Lyme Literate Medical Doctors". Many are quacks who don't follow evidence based medicine guidelines. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/florida-revokes-medical-license-of-ly…