On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:29:47 +0100 Dee <d...@deetroy.org> wrote: > I had a thought about this. Didn't the latter come about because it > became somewhat 'undesirable' to test things actually on people? In > the early days when things like bella donna and arsenic were used, > they must have tested the doses on people in order to decide what > were the beneficial amounts to take, mustn't they? I presume the > poor were used as they would have been expendable in those dark > times, as they were used for a lot of experimentation. > By this thinking, I would have thought that anecdotal evidence and > experience, should be superior to laboratory testing because the > results are irrefutable. There are too many variables in laboratory > tests to be accurate when it comes to people actually *using* stuff. > Take Vioxx for example, and Thalidomide. *They* were presumably > laboratory tested, but look at the disasters caused when given to > people! Just a notion. dee > >
I believe you are addressing the question "can a laboratory model make accurate predictions about the effect of a given substance on a human body?" (to which the answer is, of course, "once in a blue moon":)). That is a very different question from "what is the exact chemical composition of a given substance and how does it behave over time?". In fact, your question is surely more relevant to most of us. Unfortunately, clinical double-blind studies are expensive to conduct, and most of them are financed by companies who make their money from patent medicines, or researchers working with grant money, so they have a powerful incentive to skew the results of these studies (it's either "re-qualify for the grant money" or "get this product approved"), and also often to avoid head-to-head comparisons of (for example) CS and vancomycin. But the corruption rampant in the pharmaceutical industry should not be read as an indictment of scientific method. The problem is Big Pharma doing "science theater" rather than real science. For instance the clinical studies *did* catch the big problems with Vioxx, and the manufacturer simply covered it up. This sort of thing happens all the time in the pharmaceutical industry. So perhaps it is not unreasonable to consider anecdotal evidence more trustworthy than information from the FDA or Upjohn, but it's still not as reliable as the scientific method. That "correlation does not imply causation" has been more than adequately proven. OTOH, "where there is smoke there is fire" does work a lot of times, too. :) Just my $.02... indi -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: silver-list@eskimo.com Address Off-Topic messages to: silver-off-topic-l...@eskimo.com The Silver List and Off Topic List archives are currently down... List maintainer: Mike Devour <mdev...@eskimo.com>
