I wonder how this is going (started 2013), because I have a hunch it will be chasing ghosts, mostly. Placebo affect is a factor here. I also wonder how many fake leads from "propaganda physicians" they get.
I wonder how this is going (started 2013), because I have a hunch it will be chasing ghosts, mostly. Placebo affect is a factor here. I also wonder how many fake leads from "propaganda physicians" they get.
You don't know you're chasing ghosts until you start running.
There's not much wrong with the system so long as it's used as a place to get ideas for clinical studies or absolute last-ditch attempts at saving lives. On occasion (like the Milwaukee Protocol for rabies), those last-ditch attempts do work.
It's when people pretend there's no real investigation to be done that we get problems.
The real thing is can we (perhaps with new advances in statistics?) find places where doctors at the end of all known treatment try things at random and see if anything works. For rare symptoms it often isn't possible to run a proper controlled study (note that I said symptoms and not disease - often we are not really sure what is going on). So if we can give doctors a list "here is what someone else tried and or treatment Y seems to make things worse that is a clue. Eventually we can say that we don't know why, but X seems like your best shot even if it we can never get to real statistical significance.
Doctors already have case studies which they (at least should) publish anytime they get someone who for whatever reason doesn't respond to standard treatment, or has something unknown. However it is hard for the next doctor to find any that might be relevant.
Yeah, this seems like a worthwhile service, but I can't stop thinking about ivermectin.
It became apparent really fast that ivermectin was effective... against a superinfection with parasites, which the reported success cases all had.
But by the time it became apparent, the correction didn't spread nearly as fast nor wide as the original information.
The problem is, most people lack the scientific literacy to understand how science works, and many newspapers have long since gutted their expert journalists.
Excuse me? Do you know how ivermectin works? Read up on it, it blocks ion channels in invertebrates. Not mammals. It doesn't do anything to mammals unless you reach extremely high doses.