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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
> "We" . . . If you are speaking from medical training, I will defer to
> better knowledge of the field. Just let me know. All I know is from
> years on the patient side of things.
>
Meant "we" in the general sense of society not accepting doctors lying
to patients about treatments working or not.
> Yes you can. Every time a doctor gives out some antibiotics for a viral
> infection, that's a placebo. Sugar pills were found to have roughly the
> same effective treatment rate for mild depression and anxiety. So
> someone gets a mild anti-depressant for times when they are just feeling
> blue, another placebo.
>
If a doctor is giving out antibiotics for a viral infection then, yes,
they would be lying.. You give people anti-virals for viruses, which
isn't the same thing. As for sugar pills... Yes, in "rare" occasions
this has been done, but its usually with a) people that don't have
anything wrong with them in the first place, but think they do, or b)
... I am not sure, but its not as an alternative to *real* treatment,
and it is an ethics issue, which, as I understand it, gets argued a lot.
And no, I am not saying that you would advocate replacement of real
treatment with fake ones. What I am saying is that there are already
doctors that have fallen for the quack pseudoscience and false claims of
many "alternative" treatments, and they *do* often advocate for the
replacement of real medication/treatments with the ones that don't work.
This needs to be stopped, not accelerated.
> Those same fake doctors have an arsenal of things they can claim work,
> with propped up studies that back them up. Hunt them down, sure, but it
> doesn't hurt to look at their data just to see if one in a thousand of
> them might have been on to something real.
>
That is the problem. People do look at their data, and its inevitably
collected wrong, deals with tiny numbers of people, contains biases,
like, "I wanted them to feel better, and they trusted me, so they told
me they felt better, but I don't have actual proof.", and similar
useless stuff.
That is in fact the biggest problem. You can *test* whether certain
things have improved, you can't *test* if the patient's perception of
their minor aches and pains have *actually* improved from some
treatment, because the mere belief that it should improve can skew their
own perceptions, even if the actual pain experienced is *mechanically*
the same. In other words, if you could measure how much pain the nerves
where generating, it would be the same, but the *perception* of the pain
differed. This creates a real mess with this stuff, and makes even real,
but marginal, medications problematic to test, in some cases. They have
to have an effect that rises "over" a specific threshold of, "This could
just be perception, not effect."
Studies on such effects, by doctors already advocating stuff that is
just plain dumb, can't be trusted, because there is already a bias in
perception on their part, there is almost certainly one on the part of
their patients, who go there, probably, because he advocates nonsense
treatments, and that *can* skew the results by 30%, due to both the
patient exaggerating the result, and the doctor doing the same. Real
studies, the ones that fail to find anything in such cases, generally
try to find *direct* ways of measuring what is going on, when possible.
Why? Because it removes both the 15% added by patient perception, and
the 15% added by a doctor who badly wants to be helping their patients,
and *seems* to be getting the result they expected.
You have to take the subjective perceptions of both out of the equation,
as much as possible, to come up with a valid study. Most of these
studies, sadly, do neither.
--
void main () {
if version = "Vista" {
call slow_by_half();
call DRM_everything();
}
call functional_code();
}
else
call crash_windows();
}
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