Does self building improve health?

[Ferdinand]

So the person needs to run and keep up with it ?.

 

We have a chappie who walks 2 dalmations every morning, and one of them thinks it is a husky because it howls at ambulance sirens and police cars and reversing lorries. Great fun.

 

District hospital is just around the corner :-).

 

Need to look out the Hornit for the bike..

 

F

[joe90]

I know two people who were put on statins and felt terrible, they both told their doctor they would not see them, changed their diets and exercised, one changed job, and they both feel much better and no problems. Don’t talk to me about statins!.

[SteamyTea]

I often wonder how much 'illness' is just caused by misdiagnosing the symptoms, coupled with the health profession's arrogance that they are always right.

Also it is far to easy to spot a pattern, where no pattern exists, from a small sample of cases.

This is not a new problem, "Three Men in a Boat" was about ill health.

Edited May 19, 2018 by SteamyTea

[Jeremy Harris]

40 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

I often wonder how much 'illness' is just caused by misdiagnosing the symptoms, coupled with the health profession's arrogance that they are always right.

Also it is far to easy to spot a pattern, where no pattern exists, from a small sample of cases.

This is not a new problem, "Three Men in a Boat" was about ill health.

 

This might make interesting reading, given the way that medical intervention for mild hypertension was being pushed so hard a few years ago: http://www.cochrane.org/CD006742/HTN_benefits-of-antihypertensive-drugs-for-mild-hypertension-are-unclear

 

The bottom line is that for vast majority of people with no history of cardiovascular illness, but with mildly elevated BP (defined as around 140 to 159mmHg systolic, 90 to 99mmHg diastolic), which happens to be the vast majority of people taking anti-hypertension drugs, there is no good evidence to show that this treatment either decreases morbidity or mortality rates.  That flies in the face of what GPs have been telling me for decades.  FWIW, my mean BP over the past three months with no medication is 122/83mmHg, so well below the strongly recommended UK treatment threshold of 140/90mmHg...

[epsilonGreedy]

On 18/05/2018 at 14:45, JSHarris said:

 

 

The scientist within me has proved this to be true, though, otherwise I wouldn't have written what I did. 

 

Take a look at the Cochrane evidence, or better still, volunteer to help - anyone can help in some way, not just those with a background in peer reviewing papers.  It's an eye opener to see just how really bad the evidence is from the majority of medical trials and studies, frankly it's appalling in some cases, and should have more publicity. 

 

 

This sounds like opinion-based inter science rivalry, the evidence is that humans are living longer and medical science has had a large role in that achievement. We should conclude that medical science is mainly good science because it delivers a net benefit.

 

Is there a large amount of low grade science about? No doubt but that is s failure of social policy which has mandated a state funded expansion in academia beyond what our society needs or the national capacity fill those universities with high calibre brains.

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

This sounds like opinion-based inter science rivalry, the evidence is that humans are living longer and medical science has had a large role in that achievement. We should conclude that medical science is mainly good science because it delivers a net benefit.

 

Is there a large amount of low grade science about? No doubt but that is s failure of social policy which has mandated a state funded expansion in academia beyond what our society needs or the national capacity fill those universities with high calibre brains.

 

The aim of Cochrane is to remove opinions and commercial or political bias and be wholly subjective.  It's one of the reasons why so many of the evidence reviews have conclusions that show that a treatment or medication is not proven to be beneficial or otherwise.  The evidence is often rather poor, and without any doubt skewed by vested interests.

 

One example I looked at where base data was obtained*** and compared with the published findings showed that the published findings had an edited data set where many of the placebos had been removed.  The reason was almost certainly because when the drug efficacy was properly compared against the placebo results there wasn't a statistically significant difference.  That's one case out of around 30 I've looked at so far, but there is a general trend for "outliers" to be removed from published data sets, often when there seems little justification for doing so, apart from the obvious one that they seems to skew the outcome in the "wrong" direction for the pharmaceutical company.

 

In defence of those running trials and studies, it is extremely costly and time consuming to do them on a large enough scale to be able to get statistically relevant data, and often trials are more focussed on checking for adverse, or side, effects than they are on efficacy.  Once a pharmaceutical company has got as far as the human trial stages for any treatment they have invested so much money that they seem to be extremely reluctant to stop, so will prove it's acceptably safe, so they can start to market it, long before they have enough evidence to show whether or not it's really effective.  Often the effectiveness, or otherwise, of any medication or treatment only becomes clear years after it was first approved and marketed.

 

*** Some jurisdictions force this to be filed for approval, so the data is sometimes released or made available when the initial patent coverage expires.

[jack]

Re: Cochrane and its independence, there's been some issues at the board level lately, resulting in this:

 

https://nordic.cochrane.org/sites/nordic.cochrane.org/files/public/uploads/moral_crisis_in_cochrane.pdf

[ToughButterCup]

Moral Governance in crisis eh? 

 

Whose morals?

' ... This is not a personal question. It is a highly political, scientific and moral issue about the future of Cochrane. As most people know, much of my work is not very favourable to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry....'

 

For me the root problem  is simple. Ethical relativism.

[Ferdinand]

32 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

Moral Governance in crisis eh? 

 

Whose morals?

' ... This is not a personal question. It is a highly political, scientific and moral issue about the future of Cochrane. As most people know, much of my work is not very favourable to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry....'

 

For me the root problem  is simple. Ethical relativism.

 

Interesting.

 

I thought that moral objectivity and norms were in the dustbin decades ago ... and that people who still believed in the concept were generally persona non grata.

 

Historically I would link that to the rise of soft-sciences pretending to be hard-sciences, and perhaps going a little further back the decline of belief in revealed religion. Although as a non-believer one can argue that even revelation is relative.

 

Perhaps a moral consensus is also relative to the culture .

 

Perhaps what we need is to find ways to form a consensus, rather than define policy by a kind of Victim Narrative Olympics.

 

I see Cochrane as an attempt to define policy based on a consensus arrived at through what is currently regarded as scientific best practise. Though I am highly cynical about whatever are the latest pronouncements - that may be media wanting story-fodder, though.

 

A rather pernicious example this morning is that Council's are trying to build an analytical model to predict the probablility of abuse in a family. The problem there to me is that making it numerical will give it a spurious objectivity, and I do not trust Councils to be able to make such a judgement, given their record.

 

F

 

(*) I know I am off topic, but I think it is already off topic.

Edited September 17, 2018 by Ferdinand

[MikeSharp01]

Yes - it does seem a bit odd that @recoveringacademic feels that this is the result of (or could be rooted from) ethical relativism, although I think I can see how I am not sure that Ethical Relativism is well understood and in this context might well have created an unlucky outcome. The problem is what I think of as the lack of 'grey scale' understanding that it embodies. The infinite grey scale, it seems to me, gets forgotten in as much as people neglect the clear fact, as I see it -  ooops, that ethical relativism on any issue is an analog rather than digital signal - IE is has continuous change and is therefore not a step function. So this means that any two people even with the same, exactly, socialisation (By which I mean inclusive background) will still be able to identify differences between their outlooks. So where you draw the line becomes a very, very, fine thing. Hence our friend from Norway may well only be a scintilla away from the next person in the group but the line has been drawn there - I am not at clear why!   

 

PS great topic for a lunch time seminar - back to the sole plate....

Edited September 17, 2018 by MikeSharp01