ofonorow wrote:I must say this discussion is prompting me to something we have been meaning to do, but haven't found the time. Irwin Stone collected what he thought were the best vitamin C studies over the years, and has more then 700 full papers a file cabinet. These studies are old and are not accessible by any known medical database. We need to scan and post this work at the Foundation. (And that would only leave some 79,300 "old" vitamin C studies to post, if Cheraskin was correct in the 1980s that there were 80,000 such studies.) I said to read Pauling for various reasons, and you should, but not the least of which is the knowledge that vitamin C is one of the most studied substances in the history of science, just behind aspirin and the prostaglandins.
That would be great. I keep hearing about various benefits of vitamin C especially for preventing heart disease, but it's hard to find any studies demonstrating this in human subjects.
There are treatments that are shown to work, and those that are unproven.
This is what medical students and doctors are taught, however not being "proven" is the wrong way to think about this on several levels, not the least of which is there is nothing "proven" in real science. There is no such thing, I'd be prepared to debate you on this fine point, if you like, but again it requires an understanding of what science is, and what it isn't. It is a misuse of the word, and even in mathematics, a proof depends on the axioms. You can prove Euclidean geometry, based on the various axioms, which happen not to accurately represent the real world - we now think.
I think we've had a similar conversation before. When I use the word "proven" and "true", I don't use it in any absolute sense, but rather in the context of all scientific knowledge. That is, they are evidence-based yet tentative and asymptotic to truth.
Anyway, your axiom seems to be that if something worked, medical science would have studied it.
Not quite - I'm merely arguing that much of what I consider "alternative medicine" is precisely so because it has not been studied. I'm not saying that they do or do not work - but that they are unproven.
Some people think that there are two kinds of medicine - allopathic medicine controlled by evil bureaucrats and Big Pharma that largely consists of toxic drug remedies and barbaric surgical procedures, and alternative medicine characterized by natural remedies that promote "holistic" health. I think that is a mischaracterization. To me, there is medicine and there's quackery. The use of vitamins and supplements - as far as they are supported by evidence - fall under medicine. If tomorrow it was shown in double-blind placebo-controlled trials that acupuncture is an effective treatment for arthritis, I would be forced to regard it as medicine. Likewise, since evidence indicates that blood transfusions are safer than ESAs in many cases, I would support the former.
And in a sense this is true, however, such work never makes news. It is a quick way to get discredited and not receive further press or grant funding. (And imagine trying to get faculty at a university to approve research of vitamin C for heart disease!)
I really don't know why the University of California professors turned you down - but I would also think that anyone would find it difficult to convince researchers to study something other than their own choosing, unless they were willing to provide funding for it. Perhaps those particular researchers had other research interests, were already accomplished in other areas of research, or simply were not convinced that it was something worth pursuing.
But to say that it discredits researchers is something that I don't agree with. For instance, I recall there was a
studylinked to on this forum about an observed link between high ascorbic acid levels in the blood and low BP. This was also reported in the
press. Of course, it probably didn't create as much of as an impact in the media as the study in this thread, but there are good reasons for it, e.g. (i) the results are not wholly unsurprising; most people perceive vitamins to be good for you - so this was hardly good fodder for sensationalist headlines (ii) the study was relatively small in size - only 242 women were studied, etc.
If you want to really analyze your statement, get at the truth, you would be very surprised to learn that most "heavily" studied pharmaceuticals don't work in a very large segment of the people, (perhaps antibiotics excluded,). This is from statements made by the heads of the large pharmaceutical companies.
I wouldn't be surprised if certain medications don't work in certain groups of people; in fact, there are number of studies that show this. For instance, the cancer drugs Erbitux and Vectibix have been shown to be completely ineffective in advanced colorectal cancer patients whose tumors express a mutated version of a protein, whereas those whose tumors express the wild-type protein do see a modest benefit.
So of course we can never say that a particular drug will always work for every patient type; I am glad we are moving towards an era of personalized medicine, as in the future we will hopefully be able to tailor treatments based on a patients genotype or specific markers. (and apart from the legalistic definition of the term, I don't regard "drugs" as substances that exclude vitamins, minerals and other dietary supplements that are known to have a physiological effect - so I think that any argument for tailored treatments may also apply to vitamins)
The "unproven" Pauling therapy appears to CURE severe heart disease in about 10 days. Any cardiologist could monitor its effect in about 2 weeks. Yet, it has never been studied? Why? What in your fantasy world makes you think that anything that would compete with a hundred billion dollar "heart disease" industry would get fairly evaluated in medicine?
What do you mean when you say it "appears" to cure heart disease? How does one know such a thing, and how does one surmise that it is applicable to a larger population?
I do not know why the Pauling therapy has never been studied - yet if this is the case, I have to wonder why some people promote it regardless. Perhaps they don't believe in a scientific approach to healthcare.
Anyway, as a resident of Canada perhaps my perspective of things is influenced by the fact that there is a strong incentive for healthcare professionals to find treatments that are cheaper and equally as effective as existing therapies. You seem to think that there is only one kind of stakeholder that controls all medical research, i.e. the pharmaceutical industry and hospitals and doctors who profit from people being sick. But the fact remains that a lot of medical research is publicly funded - and that includes research on non-patented/non-patentable and off-patent agents. Of course, it's not a bottomless pit.
There are ongoing randomized clinical trials funded by the NIH that are looking at things like niacin and omega-3 for the treatment or prevention of cardiovascular diseases, for instance. This is not my fantasy world - it is what goes on in the real world. Not all clinical trials are funded by industry, and not all of them are set up with the sole aim of increasing profits for pharmaceutical giants. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You have no evidence whatsoever that a positive result from this study would not have been published, especially since several papers showing the benefit of certain supplements for certain medical conditions are published in the mainstream literature.
The evidence is abundant, and if you want to ruin a budding research career in the future, just try to get an article favorable to vitamin C, or other nutrients in a recognized medical journal.
Okay...let's take the New England Journal of Medicine as an example.
I did a search first for "omega-3" and found the following positive studies on the first page itself:
https://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/ab ... 31/18/1194http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abs ... 12/19/1210http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abs ... 12/19/1205Next, a quick search for "cholecalciferol":
https://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/ab ... 337/10/670http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abs ... 27/23/1637I wonder if these authors ruined their careers by publishing positive results for dietary supplements in a high-impact journal.
The reason is apparent by looking at the pages of any major journal - count the pharmaceutical ads. Who is paying for, and thus who really controls the content of these journals?
It's not surprising that medical journals contain pharmaceutical ads, considering that the readers of the journal are the ones being targetted by these ads. But their presence does not imply that the pharmaceutical companies are the one that decides what content gets published.
How does the scenario play out in your mind - say if a large randomized trial showed that high-dose ascorbic acid use over five years showed fewer mortalities from cardiovascular disease, and the investigators submit their manuscript to a top medical journal. Which pharmaceutical company has to pay off the editors? Would it be Merck, Pfizer, AstraZeneca or a consortium of all three? What if a group of researchers submits a paper showing that Drug A from Company Y is superior to Drug B from Company Z - what happens then?
If I flip through
Nature magazine, I may see ads from Invitrogen, Qiagen, Sigma-Aldrich, etc - precisely because their customers are more likely to read the journal. But I don't see any reason to think that these companies have any substantial control over what gets published.
As far as impugning the integrity of the researchers, we are building a list of those who deserve to be impugned. Any research that hides the research data after publishing the study makes the list. I can think of no valid reason not to make science public. There are obviously honest researchers at Yale, for example, who reanalyzed the Finish "beta carotene causes lung cancer" results a few years back that made all the news. A reevaluation of the same data produced a completely opposite result. Make the data public. Be prepared to defend it, and perhaps those in the alternative community, the real scientists and pioneers in my opinion, would put credence in it.
Have you contacted the investigators in this particular case?
I believe the results of all publicly funded research should be made freely available; but I don't see the utility of making the raw data itself available. Most laypeople wouldn't be able to make any sense of it.
On the other hand, if you know of any scientists in the "alternative community" who might want to do another analysis of the data, say for example, looking at women reporting a certain dose of vitamin C and comparing them to those taking no or low-doses of vitamin C - perhaps they might be open to that.
http://www.whiscience.org/collaborators/To let you know how open my mind really is, while I think the "Candle in the Ear" people are plants - phony to discredit Alt. Med, I would not dismiss any "unproven" technique
a priori - even magnets - unless there was a legit studied that was repeatable and showed no effect. On the other hand without good science, I don't push any alternative medicine. I learned long ago that as a novice in medicine, I was wise to restrict myself to what Pauling wrote. In this way, I had a scientific genius looking over my shoulder
I would not completely dismiss an "unproven" technique either. But at the same time I don't think all unproven therapies should be regarded as equal either. Given what we know about the human body, I think we can be more skeptical of certain proposed treatments.