Oh, I absolutely agree! What’s irritating me is that that now seems to be the only reason to believe that my thyroid craziness is false.
(medical science even remotely competent) ⇒ (idea is false)
As they say, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
It turns out I was a bit too fast with:
And it is obviously false! Of course medicine has tried using thyroid supplementation to fix ‘tired all the time’. It
doesn’t work!
This paper:
Clinical Response to Thyroxine Sodium in Clinically Hypothyroid but Biochemically Euthyroid Patients G. R. B. SKINNER MD DSc FRCPath FRCOG, D. HOLMES, A. AHMAD PhD, J. A. DAVIES BSc and J. BENITEZ MSc Vaccine Research Trust, 22 Alcester Road, Moseley, Birmingham B13 8BE, UK
Is the report of a man who tried the blindingly obvious thing (just treating CFS patients with thyroxine, and raising the dose until they got better), which I’ve been saying all along can’t possibly work because it is literally unbelievable that medical science can have missed this.
Apparently it worked a treat. This is from 2000. If it’s been followed up (apart from the misinterpreted Scottish trial that I referenced in the first post in support of the idea), I can’t find it.
I mean, look at all those letters: G. R. B. SKINNER MD DSc FRCPath FRCOG
This is not a homeopath. I am at an absolute loss to explain why this has been ignored.
Of course, like everyone else involved, Gordon Skinner is dead. What kills these people? Thyroxine overdose? What silences them? Alien lizard conspiracy pyramids? How would that even work?
Beware the man of one study. One study, or even a couple of studies, can prove pretty much anything simply because there are so many studies that there will be lots of statistical anomalies.
But I am the man of two studies! (The scottish trial proves that thyroxine is less bad for their patient group than for healthy controls). And as far as I can tell, there are no other studies.
And an absolute fuckton of anecdotal evidence from the web and from alternative medicine, and from my own personal experience.
Now, I do not actually believe this works without a solid PCRT with a p-value much lower than 0.05, but after seeing all this, I certainly predict that a properly designed PCRT will come up with the goods.
And it affects the health of millions! These people are asleep on the job.
Two results to p<0.05 out of a total of two relevant experiments is pretty good.
You are misreading the situation. You have two p<0.05 results out of two published studies and out of a total of no one knows how many relevant experiments.
Where is it written that no amount of bad evidence can add up to good evidence?
Thus spake the Book of Selection Bias. And the Book of Making Shit Up sagely nodded and said “Verily this is so”.
Well, fine, but in order to get two p<0.05 results by chance if there’s no effect, there’d have had to be roughly forty failed experiments done and never mentioned. Is that likely?
But the question’s easy to settle if that’s what we really think might have happened. Just pre-register and replicate one.
I really think that if there were enough interest in the question that it had prompted forty failures, someone would have had the wit to do that. Don’t you?
I mean, we’ve got an a priori plausible hypothesis, lots of evidence for, some of it solid, most of it weak, no evidence against. There would have to be one hell of a filter somewhere to justify ignoring that. Wouldn’t there?
Well, fine, but in order to get two p<0.05 results by chance if there’s no effect, there’d have had to be roughly forty failed experiments done and never mentioned. Is that likely?
First, that forty number comes from the spherical-cow land where everything is independent, normally distributed, gardens of forking paths do not exist, etc. etc. Look at the replication crisis in psychology which has been getting a lot of press recently. They have dozens of papers showing highly significant results for some effect which, as it turns out now, does not exist.
Second, consider the incentives. Say, you ran a small trial, got zero results, what are you going to do with it? No journal will be very excited about the “we tried a weird thing and it didn’t work” paper. Or, say, you got negative results, your patients started dying. Would you be terribly interested in writing up “we tried a weird thing and ended up killing some people” results?
Wouldn’t there?
You need to convince not me, but people who are good at writing grant proposals and passing ethics boards :-/
You need to convince not me, but people who are good at writing grant proposals and passing ethics boards :-/
Sure, but I have now managed to convince myself, so I am practising. Please be the most evil opponent you can be!
Second, consider the incentives.
Incentives-wise, doctors are regularly getting struck off for believing and practising this, all over the world. And the NICE guidelines specifically say that thyroxine is not to be used for the treatment of CFS. You’d think they’d be overjoyed to have a reference to quote when striking people off/writing guidelines.
Would you be terribly interested in writing up “we tried a weird thing and ended up killing some people” results?
Well, I think that’s exactly what the Scottish GPs thought they were writing up! They found ‘no difference from placebo’ in their patient group, and ‘harmful’ in their control group.
Where we differ is that I think that means that they must actually have done a fair bit of good in their patient group (specifically, in that portion of their patient group who actually had type 2 hypothyroidism, and for whom 100mg thyroxine/day was roughly the right amount. According to Skinner, that would have been too much for many of them, and too little for many others).
Oh, I absolutely agree! What’s irritating me is that that now seems to be the only reason to believe that my thyroid craziness is false.
(medical science even remotely competent) ⇒ (idea is false)
As they say, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
It turns out I was a bit too fast with:
This paper:
Clinical Response to Thyroxine Sodium in Clinically Hypothyroid but Biochemically Euthyroid Patients G. R. B. SKINNER MD DSc FRCPath FRCOG, D. HOLMES, A. AHMAD PhD, J. A. DAVIES BSc and J. BENITEZ MSc Vaccine Research Trust, 22 Alcester Road, Moseley, Birmingham B13 8BE, UK
Is the report of a man who tried the blindingly obvious thing (just treating CFS patients with thyroxine, and raising the dose until they got better), which I’ve been saying all along can’t possibly work because it is literally unbelievable that medical science can have missed this.
Apparently it worked a treat. This is from 2000. If it’s been followed up (apart from the misinterpreted Scottish trial that I referenced in the first post in support of the idea), I can’t find it.
I mean, look at all those letters: G. R. B. SKINNER MD DSc FRCPath FRCOG
This is not a homeopath. I am at an absolute loss to explain why this has been ignored.
Of course, like everyone else involved, Gordon Skinner is dead. What kills these people? Thyroxine overdose? What silences them? Alien lizard conspiracy pyramids? How would that even work?
Beware the man of one study. One study, or even a couple of studies, can prove pretty much anything simply because there are so many studies that there will be lots of statistical anomalies.
But I am the man of two studies! (The scottish trial proves that thyroxine is less bad for their patient group than for healthy controls). And as far as I can tell, there are no other studies.
And an absolute fuckton of anecdotal evidence from the web and from alternative medicine, and from my own personal experience.
Now, I do not actually believe this works without a solid PCRT with a p-value much lower than 0.05, but after seeing all this, I certainly predict that a properly designed PCRT will come up with the goods.
And it affects the health of millions! These people are asleep on the job.
Two counts as “a couple of studies”.
That’s equivalent to “no good evidence”. You can’t make up for quality with quantity here.
Now we are in actual disagreement. Two results to p<0.05 out of a total of two relevant experiments is pretty good.
If there were a further four with ‘no effect’ I might be less impressed. But there aren’t, unless they’re in a file drawer somewhere.
Where is it written that no amount of bad evidence can add up to good evidence? Evidence is evidence, Bayes-wise.
I say that the sun rises every morning. There has been no PCRT. Am I likely mistaken?
You are misreading the situation. You have two p<0.05 results out of two published studies and out of a total of no one knows how many relevant experiments.
Thus spake the Book of Selection Bias. And the Book of Making Shit Up sagely nodded and said “Verily this is so”.
Well, fine, but in order to get two p<0.05 results by chance if there’s no effect, there’d have had to be roughly forty failed experiments done and never mentioned. Is that likely?
But the question’s easy to settle if that’s what we really think might have happened. Just pre-register and replicate one.
I really think that if there were enough interest in the question that it had prompted forty failures, someone would have had the wit to do that. Don’t you?
I mean, we’ve got an a priori plausible hypothesis, lots of evidence for, some of it solid, most of it weak, no evidence against. There would have to be one hell of a filter somewhere to justify ignoring that. Wouldn’t there?
First, that forty number comes from the spherical-cow land where everything is independent, normally distributed, gardens of forking paths do not exist, etc. etc. Look at the replication crisis in psychology which has been getting a lot of press recently. They have dozens of papers showing highly significant results for some effect which, as it turns out now, does not exist.
Second, consider the incentives. Say, you ran a small trial, got zero results, what are you going to do with it? No journal will be very excited about the “we tried a weird thing and it didn’t work” paper. Or, say, you got negative results, your patients started dying. Would you be terribly interested in writing up “we tried a weird thing and ended up killing some people” results?
You need to convince not me, but people who are good at writing grant proposals and passing ethics boards :-/
Sure, but I have now managed to convince myself, so I am practising. Please be the most evil opponent you can be!
Incentives-wise, doctors are regularly getting struck off for believing and practising this, all over the world. And the NICE guidelines specifically say that thyroxine is not to be used for the treatment of CFS. You’d think they’d be overjoyed to have a reference to quote when striking people off/writing guidelines.
Well, I think that’s exactly what the Scottish GPs thought they were writing up! They found ‘no difference from placebo’ in their patient group, and ‘harmful’ in their control group.
Where we differ is that I think that means that they must actually have done a fair bit of good in their patient group (specifically, in that portion of their patient group who actually had type 2 hypothyroidism, and for whom 100mg thyroxine/day was roughly the right amount. According to Skinner, that would have been too much for many of them, and too little for many others).