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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 6, 2012 15:45:21 GMT 1
I sympathise enormously with Kate's morning sickness. Absolutely mind and body sapping. You binge drinkers will know what it's like - morning after, except it's EVERY morning and can last ALL day! Thalidomide was prescribed for morning sickness, incidentally! Nice! I went to a Café Scientifique talk followed by discussion with the other Leeds Climateers on Tuesday. The talk was by Dr David Healey a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist. I recommend his blog for those interested in how drugs get on to the market. It's definitely not NICE! davidhealy.org/davidhealy.org/blog/Makes you very glad you are neither mentally ill, depressed or with an unruly child! Total exposé of Big Pharma's control of peer review and NICE's statutory dependence upon peer review for its "evidence". In fact far too many similarities between Big Pharma and IPCC Climate Science for comfort! |
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 7, 2012 18:21:19 GMT 1
The unemployables at NICE are very keen on "meta-analysis", where instead of actually doing any science, you make a living from counting the number of peer-reviewed published positive findings about a product.
The snag is that (a) nobody is going to submit any negative findings for publication, (b) a good writer or social mixer can get the same positive data reported in umpteen different papers and (c) a known "authority" figure will also have his publications cited by lots of acolytes (including his own students).
So a useless drug with a good pedigree will make it into the charts, whilst an effective maverick won't.
So much for the science and politics. Now for the psychology: Someone I don't know is pregnant. Why is this news? OK, the offspring in this case is likely to become head of the Commonwealth. So what? There are plenty of others in line to the throne, and we have no way of knowing in advance whether any of them is going to be any good at it.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 7, 2012 19:55:57 GMT 1
Precisely what Dr Healey said in his talk, Mr Calverd (not the bit about royalty).
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 7, 2012 20:56:46 GMT 1
I think the problem stems from having nonscientists in charge of things. Nonscientists like democracy and consensus because it gives them a sense of wielding power without having to make actual decisions or being liable for the results of their actions.
Science is not democratic, nor does it respect consensus. At worst, we may use a few statistics to extract signal from noise, but the goal is always to construct the one definitive experiment that demonstrates the robustness of your hypothesis. The unarguable consensus that the world is flat or the moon is made of green cheese, is only, but utterly, demolished by actually going there and showing that it isn't.
All the great names of medicine and public health (Jenner, Semmelweiss, Pasteur, Charnley, Bazalgette...)were mavericks. Beware of consensus, committee decision, meta-analysis, call it what you will, which at best is average and always represents the sum of yesterday's thinking and today's prejudice, never the Next Big Thing.
But....thalidomide was a fine example of a drug that showed no ill-effects in rabbits and definitely suppressed nausea in humans. As a consequence of that dreadful cockup, modern drug trials generally exclude pregnant women, and there's a pretty strong consensus against extensive trials on pregnant monkeys*, so the best advice on morning sickness seems, alas, to be "grin and bear it" unless it is progressively and seriously debilitating.
* I do a lot of work with vets. Pet owners, the most sincere of animal-lovers, don't seem at all worried that all their medicines and surgical techniques are tested on animals.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 8, 2012 10:22:27 GMT 1
One of Dr Healey's points was that it was because Thalidomide was available over the counter without prescription that its effect on the foetus became apparent so quickly. His view is that if it had been on prescription the GP and peer review system would have combined to obfuscate the unwelcome side effect of the drug.
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Post by marchesarosa on Dec 8, 2012 10:25:27 GMT 1
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Post by principled on Dec 8, 2012 14:57:50 GMT 1
Thanks for the info Marchesa. Turns out that my local town has a cafe scientifique. Will certainly pop along and check it out.
P
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