If none of the patients had had any sort of thyroid problem, I’d have expected it to be equally bad for everyone.
I’m talking about conservation of expected evidence. If X is positive evidence, then ~X is negative evidence. An experiment only supports a hypothesis if it was possible for it to come out another way that refutes it. And if an experiment that could have supported the hypothesis actually didn’t, then it’s evidence against.
What makes me think that they felt bad on thyroxine is table 2, where all the ‘self-reported’ psychological scores have got worse from thyroxine. In particular p=0.007 for the decline in Vitality. Since, as you point out, they really didn’t know which was which, it’s hard to see how they could have faked that.
Terminology then. When you said “Thyroxine is very strongly disliked by the healthy controls (they could tell it from placebo and hated it),” it suggests they could identify the active treatment.
Absolutely this treatment is harmful to healthy people.
The people in the study had symptoms. Even if you think their symptoms were mild or unrepresentative, you shouldn’t call them healthy. It’s fair to extend the conclusion to cover people without those symptoms, but I think that’s an important difference.
Yes, but that does mean that anything that needs careful dose control will get rejected.
It’s more that you need an easily followed protocol. Anything else, especially anything subjective, is unlikely to be practically feasible, and will probably not be reproducible.
The TSH test replaced that around 1970. But they never seem to have checked that clinical and biochemical diagnoses detected the same things, and after that there was the slow emergence of all sorts of nasty diseases that look very like hypothyroidism in the clinical sense but have normal TSH.
This is normal. Clinical presentations often have many causes, which makes it almost impossible to progress. Eventually we break them down based on their causal mechanisms so we can treat them individually. Each time we find a new cause, some of the cases will be left unexplained.
These are the only ones I can find through google scholar / pubmed. That in itself is really surprising and one of the things I can’t explain! Why has such an obvious thing not been ruled out?
There are a lot of interesting hypotheses competing for resources, and we have to decide which ones are worth considering. I can’t say what the reason might be here, but there are a lot of possibilities. For example, it might not be possible to design a study like the one you want that could effectively answer the question.
Really? Forty years of experience in treating patients is less valuable than a single anecdote published in a journal? Really?
Yes. Expert opinion (i.e., the opinion of individual experts, not expert consensus) is the lowest level because you can find an expert to support pretty much any proposition that isn’t obviously ridiculous, and sometimes even if it is. In fact, this is true higher in the hierarchy as well, which is why we use syntheses of evidence so much. I can’t stress this enough: in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.
All the rest of it is anecdotal, from alternative sources, but there’s a mountain of it.
The point of evidence-based medicine is that perceptions are unreliable. That includes the perceptions we call clinical experience (which once said that bloodletting was an important medical treatment). Keep in mind that doctors aren’t scientists and usually don’t even qualify as experts. EBM is unreliable too, but less so, just like science is unreliable but is still better than ancestral wisdom.
The TSH test ruling out hypothyroidism is expert opinion. Its reliability is unfounded dogma.
This sounds like you’re saying the TSH test doesn’t actually measure TSH, but I think you mean to say you disagree with the conclusions that it’s used for. But since hypothyroidism is defined as low thyroid hormone levels, some of this will be a dispute over definitions.
I can’t find any evidence for it as the sole measure of thyroid system function at all.
I don’t think anyone who understands it would say it is. It measures TSH levels, and the question is what we do with that measurement. But we’re often limited by what we’re able to (easily) measure, and it might even be the only objective measurement we have.
in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.
Et tu, Brut? That is obviously true for humanities and for things like observational studies of nutrition, but do you think it extends to most / all of biology? “For any hypothesis there is a mouse strain which proves it true”? :-/
...we face a replication crisis in the field of biomedicine, not unlike the one we’ve seen in psychology but with far more dire implications. Sloppy data analysis, contaminated lab materials, and poor experimental design all contribute to the problem.
...Freedman and his co-authors guessed that fully half of all results rest on shaky ground, and might not be replicable in other labs. These cancer studies don’t merely fail to find a cure; they might not offer any useful data whatsoever.
In most ways biology is intermediate between the hard and soft sciences, with all that implies. It’s usually impossible to identify all the confounders, most biologists are not trained in statistics, experiments are complex and you can get different results from slight variations in protocol, we’re trying to generalize from imperfect models, many high-profile results don’t get tested by other labs, … all these factors come together and we get something that people call a “replication crisis.”
Oh God, where will this end? Is it really only physics and chemistry that aren’t sloppy cargo-cults, or are they broken too?
A lot of this, I think is to do with taking tenure away from young academics. Once upon a time once you’d proved basic competence and cleverness, you could spend your whole career being careful about stuff. These days you’ve just got to turn out crap as fast as possible. And you spend most of your time applying for grants.
I’m talking about conservation of expected evidence.
Sure, this experiment is evidence against ‘all fat, tired people with dry hair get better with thryoxine’. No problem there.
Terminology then. When you said “Thyroxine is very strongly disliked by the healthy controls (they could tell it from placebo and hated it),” it suggests they could identify the active treatment.
Yes, it is kind of odd isn’t it? One of the pills apparently made them a bit unwell, and yet they couldn’t tell which one. I notice that I am confused.
The people in the study had symptoms.
You’re right. I think I should have said “This treatment is harmful to most people”.
This is normal...
But that’s awful! Once, there was a diagnostic method, and a treatment that worked fine, that everyone thought was brilliant. Then they invented a test, which is very clever, and a good test for what it tests, and the result of that is that lots of people are ill and don’t get the treatment any more and have to suffer horribly and die early.
If that’s normal then there’s something badly wrong with normal. A new way of measuring things should help!
we have to decide which ones are worth considering.
Sure, I’m trying to make a case that this one is worth considering.
it might not be possible to design a study ..
I think the Scottish study with stricter entry criteria for the patient group would do. If that failed, I would be quite surprised.
If someone did the same thing with stricter entry criteria and used desiccated thyroid and titrated doses and it failed I would be so surprised that I would give up.
Seriously, if ‘start off with low doses and keep raising the dose until you get a response’ is inaccessible to testing, then something is broken.
But in fact, just ‘low basal metabolic rate in CFS’ would be good evidence in favour, I think. We can work out optimal treatments later.
And if it turned out that there wasn’t a subset of CFS patients with high Billewicz scores and low basal metabolic rates, I’d give up. No study needed.
I can’t stress this enough: in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.
At that point, we’re all post-modernists aren’t we? The truth is socially determined.
science is unreliable but is still better than ancestral wisdom
Science is not unreliable. If I can surprise a physicist or a chemist about something he is sure of, he will be very very interested, and science will quickly rearrange itself around the new fact. It took about five years to completely overturn classical physics and replace it with something we haven’t managed to surprise yet, even though everyone knows that the new theories are broken and is actively trying to find things that happen that they don’t predict. And classical physics is still damned good in the domains that it used to work in.
There’s at least a possibility here that medical science is getting beaten hollow by chiropractors and quack doctors and internet loonies, none of whom have any resources or funding at all.
Even the possibility is enough to make me think that there’s something appallingly badly wrong with the methods and structure of medical science.
Sure, this experiment is evidence against ‘all fat, tired people with dry hair get better with thryoxine’. No problem there.
Okay, but you said it was evidence in favor of your own hypothesis. That’s what my question was about.
Yes, it is kind of odd isn’t it? One of the pills apparently made them a bit unwell, and yet they couldn’t tell which one. I notice that I am confused.
Suppose they’re measuring on a 10-point scale, and we get ordered pairs of scores for time A and time B. One person might have 7 and 6, another has (4,3), another has (5,6), then (9,7), (7,7), (4,5), (3,2)...Even if they’re aware of their measurements (which they might not be), all sorts of things affect their scores and it’s unlikely that any one person would be able to make a conclusion. You’re basically asking an untrained patient to draw a conclusion from an n of 1.
But that’s awful! Once, there was a diagnostic method, and a treatment that worked fine, that everyone thought was brilliant. Then they invented a test, which is very clever, and a good test for what it tests, and the result of that is that lots of people are ill and don’t get the treatment any more and have to suffer horribly and die early.
There are several assumptions here that I think are probably incorrect, the biggest being the causal link between introducing the test and people suffering. But what I described before is just the application of reductionism to better distinguish between disease states based on their causal mechanism.
If that’s normal then there’s something badly wrong with normal. A new way of measuring things should help!
Sometimes, but replacing an objective measurement with a subjective one isn’t usually a step forward.
Seriously, if ‘start off with low doses and keep raising the dose until you get a response’ is inaccessible to testing, then something is broken.
Problems with this include: you can’t justify the parameters of the dose increase, you still have to agree on how to measure the response, and you also have a multiple testing issue. It isn’t inaccessible, but it’s a complication (potentially a major one), and that’s just in the abstract. Practically, in any one situation there might be another half dozen issues that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone who isn’t an expert.
But in fact, just ‘low basal metabolic rate in CFS’ would be good evidence in favour, I think. We can work out optimal treatments later.
Not knowing anything about the subject, I would expect to observe a low basal metabolic rate in CFS regardless of its ultimate cause or causes.
At that point, we’re all post-modernists aren’t we? The truth is socially determined.
No, it just means we put very little weight on individual studies. We don’t pay much attention to results that haven’t been replicated a few times, and rely heavily on summaries like meta-analyses.
Science is not unreliable...
You’re talking about the overall process and how science moves in the direction of truth, which I agree with. I’m talking on the level of individual papers and how our current best knowledge may still be overturned in the future. But you can leave out “just like..wisdom” from the paragraph without losing the main points.
There’s at least a possibility here that medical science is getting beaten hollow by chiropractors and quack doctors and internet loonies, none of whom have any resources or funding at all.
The alt med people have a lot of funding. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Even the possibility is enough to make me think that there’s something appallingly badly wrong with the methods and structure of medical science.
A few things, not just one, but it’s the best we have at the moment.
No, it just means we put very little weight on individual studies. We don’t pay much attention to results that haven’t been replicated a few times, and rely heavily on summaries like meta-analyses.
So, for instance, Skinner, who may or may not have demonstrated and published something really important and blindingly obvious in hindsight, gets ignored and then eventually pretty much struck off for it, even though his results could have been put to formal trial for about 50p.
Is the only way we learn anything new if seven different people do the necessary research at their own expense and get their lives destroyed as a consequence?
And nothing done outside the system is worth anything at all?
And the opinions of patients and doctors are ‘placebo effect?’.
And the patients’ obvious symptoms are ‘psychosomatic/somatoform/hypochondriac/malingering’? All the same bloody word, changed every decade or so when people realise what they mean.
And someone invents a wonderful new measurement technique that bears on a hard problem, and it’s used to make things worse?
No, it just means we put very little weight on individual studies. We don’t pay much attention to results that haven’t been replicated a few times, and rely heavily on summaries like meta-analyses.
So, for instance, Skinner, who may or may not have demonstrated and published something really important and blindingly obvious in hindsight, gets ignored and then eventually pretty much struck off for it, even though his results could have been put to formal trial for about 50p.
Is the only way you learn anything new if seven different people do the necessary research at their own expense and get their lives destroyed as a consequence?
Not knowing anything about the subject, I would expect to observe a low basal metabolic rate in CFS regardless of its ultimate cause or causes.
Ooh, why? I thought that was thyroid and starvation?
I mean, low once you adjust for all the known predictive factors, e.g. age, sex, height, weight and exercise. Obviously people who have trouble standing up are going to show low BMR in absolute terms. But I mean ‘even after adjusting for sedentary lifestyle’.
The alt med people have a lot of funding. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry.
OK, but none of that funding is going in favour of the likes of John Lowe or Gordon Skinner or Barry Durrant-Peatfield or Sarah Myhill, in fact those people are losing/risking their licences and livelihoods in order to try to help people. They may or may not be right about their methods, but they’re not doing it for the money!
Ken Blanchard appears to have built an endocrinology practice out of treating hypothyroidism ‘functionally’, but I’m sure he could have done just as well doing it ‘conventionally’, and been risking far less legal trouble.
Okay, but you said it was evidence in favor of your own hypothesis. That’s what my question was about.
I must be confused here. Sorry, I’m not deliberately evading your (good!) question.
If none of the patients had had any sort of thyroid problem, I’d have expected it to be equally bad for everyone. That would be strong evidence against ‘it’s widespread and treatable with thyroxine’, and very weak evidence against ‘CFS is thyroidy’.
A test is allowed to produce weak evidence one way and strong evidence the other. Imagine rolling a dice. If it comes out 5, you’ve not learned much. If it comes out 7, that’s a big surprise, and enough to smash the ‘six-sided’ theory into the very long grass.
If a fair number of the normal-TSH patient group had nevertheless had a thyroid problem amenable to thyroxine 100mg/day, then I’d have expected that to make a difference between healthy controls and patients. Which appears to be what happened. I think that’s actually fairly strong evidence in favour of ‘common and treatable with thyroxine’. Nowhere near proof, but it strengthens Skinner’s paper, which is already strong evidence, rather than weakening it.
I’m actually really surprised by that. That thyroxine made any difference at all.
I believed it was thyroidy just on the argument in ‘A medical mystery’. (Looks like hypothyroidism, existed in Victorian times, didn’t exist 1900-1970 when hypothyroidism was diagnosed by symptoms and treated with desiccated thyroid, which has too much T3 in it, validity of TSH test never checked)
I’ve been saying for a while that it must be to do with T4/T3 balance, because I couldn″t believe that if it was amenable to thyroxine that wouldn’t already be known. Because I literally couldn’t believe that medical science could have been that careless and stupid.
But now I’m looking at the only two papers I’ve ever been able to find on the subject, and thinking, ‘they both imply that thyroxine works’. It might not be optimal, but it seems to do something!
And sure, it’s nowhere near proof, and I wouldn’t want public health policy changed on this kind of evidence. But it’s worth a good look. And the level of carelessness implied is just staggering.
If they’d just made a terrible mistake and then ignored millions screaming for help for forty years, that would be criminal, but John Lowe and lots of medical doctors had/have been asking, perfectly clearly and sanely, for endocrinology to check its beliefs, for decades.
And they’ve been marginalised, ridiculed, and persecuted for it. “TSH tests normal, therefore it can’t be a thyroid issue.” Over and over and over again. No evidence whatsoever.
Even if CFS turns out to be caused by magic space pixies who deliberately confuse all the experiments, medical science has my utter contempt.
Six months ago I would have said: “There’s no point to alternative medicine, if they had anything that worked it would just be real medicine.”. In fact my friends (and the chiropractor I used to go and see even though I believed her treatments didn’t really help and I was allowing myself to buy a placebo) tell me I used to say that quite a lot.
Because I trusted something extravagantly publicly funded, that called itself a science, to use the scientific method.
After taking a (fairly brief) look at this one problem, I’m now thinking “How many lives have these morons fucked up through their arrogance and carelessness?”.
“How much of the random crap in Holland and Barrett actually works, and how much public money is being shoved down the drain buying chemical poisons for the ill on dodgy evidence produced by drugs companies when they could be fixed with cheap treatments that have been known for years?”
I’m talking about conservation of expected evidence. If X is positive evidence, then ~X is negative evidence. An experiment only supports a hypothesis if it was possible for it to come out another way that refutes it. And if an experiment that could have supported the hypothesis actually didn’t, then it’s evidence against.
Terminology then. When you said “Thyroxine is very strongly disliked by the healthy controls (they could tell it from placebo and hated it),” it suggests they could identify the active treatment.
The people in the study had symptoms. Even if you think their symptoms were mild or unrepresentative, you shouldn’t call them healthy. It’s fair to extend the conclusion to cover people without those symptoms, but I think that’s an important difference.
It’s more that you need an easily followed protocol. Anything else, especially anything subjective, is unlikely to be practically feasible, and will probably not be reproducible.
This is normal. Clinical presentations often have many causes, which makes it almost impossible to progress. Eventually we break them down based on their causal mechanisms so we can treat them individually. Each time we find a new cause, some of the cases will be left unexplained.
There are a lot of interesting hypotheses competing for resources, and we have to decide which ones are worth considering. I can’t say what the reason might be here, but there are a lot of possibilities. For example, it might not be possible to design a study like the one you want that could effectively answer the question.
Yes. Expert opinion (i.e., the opinion of individual experts, not expert consensus) is the lowest level because you can find an expert to support pretty much any proposition that isn’t obviously ridiculous, and sometimes even if it is. In fact, this is true higher in the hierarchy as well, which is why we use syntheses of evidence so much. I can’t stress this enough: in biology, you can use peer-reviewed evidence to make plausible arguments for arbitrary hypotheses.
The point of evidence-based medicine is that perceptions are unreliable. That includes the perceptions we call clinical experience (which once said that bloodletting was an important medical treatment). Keep in mind that doctors aren’t scientists and usually don’t even qualify as experts. EBM is unreliable too, but less so, just like science is unreliable but is still better than ancestral wisdom.
This sounds like you’re saying the TSH test doesn’t actually measure TSH, but I think you mean to say you disagree with the conclusions that it’s used for. But since hypothyroidism is defined as low thyroid hormone levels, some of this will be a dispute over definitions.
I don’t think anyone who understands it would say it is. It measures TSH levels, and the question is what we do with that measurement. But we’re often limited by what we’re able to (easily) measure, and it might even be the only objective measurement we have.
Et tu, Brut? That is obviously true for humanities and for things like observational studies of nutrition, but do you think it extends to most / all of biology? “For any hypothesis there is a mouse strain which proves it true”? :-/
Hmmm
This piece claims that
This open-access article discusses some of the issues in cancer research.
In most ways biology is intermediate between the hard and soft sciences, with all that implies. It’s usually impossible to identify all the confounders, most biologists are not trained in statistics, experiments are complex and you can get different results from slight variations in protocol, we’re trying to generalize from imperfect models, many high-profile results don’t get tested by other labs, … all these factors come together and we get something that people call a “replication crisis.”
tl;dr It’s complicated.
Yes, I know. But it would be nice if people recognized that it is complicated and not pretend that we know more than we actually do.
Oh God, where will this end? Is it really only physics and chemistry that aren’t sloppy cargo-cults, or are they broken too?
A lot of this, I think is to do with taking tenure away from young academics. Once upon a time once you’d proved basic competence and cleverness, you could spend your whole career being careful about stuff. These days you’ve just got to turn out crap as fast as possible. And you spend most of your time applying for grants.
Vocative!
Sure, this experiment is evidence against ‘all fat, tired people with dry hair get better with thryoxine’. No problem there.
Yes, it is kind of odd isn’t it? One of the pills apparently made them a bit unwell, and yet they couldn’t tell which one. I notice that I am confused.
You’re right. I think I should have said “This treatment is harmful to most people”.
But that’s awful! Once, there was a diagnostic method, and a treatment that worked fine, that everyone thought was brilliant. Then they invented a test, which is very clever, and a good test for what it tests, and the result of that is that lots of people are ill and don’t get the treatment any more and have to suffer horribly and die early.
If that’s normal then there’s something badly wrong with normal. A new way of measuring things should help!
Sure, I’m trying to make a case that this one is worth considering.
I think the Scottish study with stricter entry criteria for the patient group would do. If that failed, I would be quite surprised.
If someone did the same thing with stricter entry criteria and used desiccated thyroid and titrated doses and it failed I would be so surprised that I would give up.
Seriously, if ‘start off with low doses and keep raising the dose until you get a response’ is inaccessible to testing, then something is broken.
But in fact, just ‘low basal metabolic rate in CFS’ would be good evidence in favour, I think. We can work out optimal treatments later.
And if it turned out that there wasn’t a subset of CFS patients with high Billewicz scores and low basal metabolic rates, I’d give up. No study needed.
At that point, we’re all post-modernists aren’t we? The truth is socially determined.
Science is not unreliable. If I can surprise a physicist or a chemist about something he is sure of, he will be very very interested, and science will quickly rearrange itself around the new fact. It took about five years to completely overturn classical physics and replace it with something we haven’t managed to surprise yet, even though everyone knows that the new theories are broken and is actively trying to find things that happen that they don’t predict. And classical physics is still damned good in the domains that it used to work in.
There’s at least a possibility here that medical science is getting beaten hollow by chiropractors and quack doctors and internet loonies, none of whom have any resources or funding at all.
Even the possibility is enough to make me think that there’s something appallingly badly wrong with the methods and structure of medical science.
Okay, but you said it was evidence in favor of your own hypothesis. That’s what my question was about.
Suppose they’re measuring on a 10-point scale, and we get ordered pairs of scores for time A and time B. One person might have 7 and 6, another has (4,3), another has (5,6), then (9,7), (7,7), (4,5), (3,2)...Even if they’re aware of their measurements (which they might not be), all sorts of things affect their scores and it’s unlikely that any one person would be able to make a conclusion. You’re basically asking an untrained patient to draw a conclusion from an n of 1.
There are several assumptions here that I think are probably incorrect, the biggest being the causal link between introducing the test and people suffering. But what I described before is just the application of reductionism to better distinguish between disease states based on their causal mechanism.
Sometimes, but replacing an objective measurement with a subjective one isn’t usually a step forward.
Problems with this include: you can’t justify the parameters of the dose increase, you still have to agree on how to measure the response, and you also have a multiple testing issue. It isn’t inaccessible, but it’s a complication (potentially a major one), and that’s just in the abstract. Practically, in any one situation there might be another half dozen issues that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone who isn’t an expert.
Not knowing anything about the subject, I would expect to observe a low basal metabolic rate in CFS regardless of its ultimate cause or causes.
No, it just means we put very little weight on individual studies. We don’t pay much attention to results that haven’t been replicated a few times, and rely heavily on summaries like meta-analyses.
You’re talking about the overall process and how science moves in the direction of truth, which I agree with. I’m talking on the level of individual papers and how our current best knowledge may still be overturned in the future. But you can leave out “just like..wisdom” from the paragraph without losing the main points.
The alt med people have a lot of funding. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry.
A few things, not just one, but it’s the best we have at the moment.
So, for instance, Skinner, who may or may not have demonstrated and published something really important and blindingly obvious in hindsight, gets ignored and then eventually pretty much struck off for it, even though his results could have been put to formal trial for about 50p.
Is the only way we learn anything new if seven different people do the necessary research at their own expense and get their lives destroyed as a consequence?
And nothing done outside the system is worth anything at all?
And the opinions of patients and doctors are ‘placebo effect?’.
And the patients’ obvious symptoms are ‘psychosomatic/somatoform/hypochondriac/malingering’? All the same bloody word, changed every decade or so when people realise what they mean.
And someone invents a wonderful new measurement technique that bears on a hard problem, and it’s used to make things worse?
So, for instance, Skinner, who may or may not have demonstrated and published something really important and blindingly obvious in hindsight, gets ignored and then eventually pretty much struck off for it, even though his results could have been put to formal trial for about 50p.
Is the only way you learn anything new if seven different people do the necessary research at their own expense and get their lives destroyed as a consequence?
Ooh, why? I thought that was thyroid and starvation?
I mean, low once you adjust for all the known predictive factors, e.g. age, sex, height, weight and exercise. Obviously people who have trouble standing up are going to show low BMR in absolute terms. But I mean ‘even after adjusting for sedentary lifestyle’.
Surely the ‘stress’ theory predicts high BMR?
OK, but none of that funding is going in favour of the likes of John Lowe or Gordon Skinner or Barry Durrant-Peatfield or Sarah Myhill, in fact those people are losing/risking their licences and livelihoods in order to try to help people. They may or may not be right about their methods, but they’re not doing it for the money!
Ken Blanchard appears to have built an endocrinology practice out of treating hypothyroidism ‘functionally’, but I’m sure he could have done just as well doing it ‘conventionally’, and been risking far less legal trouble.
I must be confused here. Sorry, I’m not deliberately evading your (good!) question.
If none of the patients had had any sort of thyroid problem, I’d have expected it to be equally bad for everyone. That would be strong evidence against ‘it’s widespread and treatable with thyroxine’, and very weak evidence against ‘CFS is thyroidy’.
A test is allowed to produce weak evidence one way and strong evidence the other. Imagine rolling a dice. If it comes out 5, you’ve not learned much. If it comes out 7, that’s a big surprise, and enough to smash the ‘six-sided’ theory into the very long grass.
If a fair number of the normal-TSH patient group had nevertheless had a thyroid problem amenable to thyroxine 100mg/day, then I’d have expected that to make a difference between healthy controls and patients. Which appears to be what happened. I think that’s actually fairly strong evidence in favour of ‘common and treatable with thyroxine’. Nowhere near proof, but it strengthens Skinner’s paper, which is already strong evidence, rather than weakening it.
I’m actually really surprised by that. That thyroxine made any difference at all.
I believed it was thyroidy just on the argument in ‘A medical mystery’. (Looks like hypothyroidism, existed in Victorian times, didn’t exist 1900-1970 when hypothyroidism was diagnosed by symptoms and treated with desiccated thyroid, which has too much T3 in it, validity of TSH test never checked)
I’ve been saying for a while that it must be to do with T4/T3 balance, because I couldn″t believe that if it was amenable to thyroxine that wouldn’t already be known. Because I literally couldn’t believe that medical science could have been that careless and stupid.
But now I’m looking at the only two papers I’ve ever been able to find on the subject, and thinking, ‘they both imply that thyroxine works’. It might not be optimal, but it seems to do something!
And sure, it’s nowhere near proof, and I wouldn’t want public health policy changed on this kind of evidence. But it’s worth a good look. And the level of carelessness implied is just staggering.
If they’d just made a terrible mistake and then ignored millions screaming for help for forty years, that would be criminal, but John Lowe and lots of medical doctors had/have been asking, perfectly clearly and sanely, for endocrinology to check its beliefs, for decades. And they’ve been marginalised, ridiculed, and persecuted for it. “TSH tests normal, therefore it can’t be a thyroid issue.” Over and over and over again. No evidence whatsoever. Even if CFS turns out to be caused by magic space pixies who deliberately confuse all the experiments, medical science has my utter contempt. Six months ago I would have said: “There’s no point to alternative medicine, if they had anything that worked it would just be real medicine.”. In fact my friends (and the chiropractor I used to go and see even though I believed her treatments didn’t really help and I was allowing myself to buy a placebo) tell me I used to say that quite a lot. Because I trusted something extravagantly publicly funded, that called itself a science, to use the scientific method. After taking a (fairly brief) look at this one problem, I’m now thinking “How many lives have these morons fucked up through their arrogance and carelessness?”. “How much of the random crap in Holland and Barrett actually works, and how much public money is being shoved down the drain buying chemical poisons for the ill on dodgy evidence produced by drugs companies when they could be fixed with cheap treatments that have been known for years?”