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Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

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31–40 of 181 posts

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#31
The problem is that once you "empower" people you also empower everything from straight out morons to manipulative sociopaths - which has led from relatively harmless homeopathic "medicine" (which is harmless but many people use homeopathic medicine even for serious illness and go to the doctor only when it's unbearable), to the rise of anti-vax movement (where lots of kids actually even died from measles exposure in the last few years) and finally people consuming deadly sodium chlorite (aka MMS).

Allowing people to take health purely into their own hands leads down to a very dangerous path, especially when children are involved (as children cannot help themselves against ignorant parents).

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#32

The problem is that once you "empower" people you also empower everything from straight out morons to manipulative sociopaths - which has led from relatively harmless homeopathic "medicine" (which is harmless but many people use homeopathic medicine even for serious illness and go to the doctor only when it's unbearable), to the rise of anti-vax movement (where lots of kids actually even died from measles exposure in…

Allowing people to take health purely into their own hands leads down to a very dangerous path

I said nothing whatsoever to adovocate allowing such a thing.

But thank you for providing evidence of my statement about how controlling a lot of people want to be when it comes to such topics.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#33
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a bot or a real person? How could you ban cytokines? That doesn't even mean anything to the point where I'm not sure you are a human author.

2464 karma, so probably no, not a bot. Highly clueless about cytokines, though...

I would expect bots to have lots of karma.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What incentive do they have besides being a heroic, indefatigable person? If anything, they're increasing their attack surface for being blamed or sued.

Curious about this. I often find engineers motivated purely by the desire to solve the problem. Was just at defcon - witnessed many people vaguely wandering around the tables of teams trying to hack devices, then getting sucked in as they offered solutions and inevitably got involved with trying to solve the problem. Did it myself a couple times, even though I had planned on attending more talks.

They hate solving problems when someone comes up to them with a strange and incomplete description and says "can you fix my problem"? The made a whole show about this called the IT Crowd where they play a tape that says "Have you tried turning it on and off again" instead of legitimately answering phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd

Here's a subreddit where people complain about the problems that people bring them: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/

Here's a subreddit for which the tagline starts with "Tired of stupid customers?": https://www.reddit.com/r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/

There are many problems in the tech field which are exceedingly difficult yet uninteresting. There are many problems that people bring that are vague descriptions that eventually turn out to be user error. It would not be surprising for the same phenomenon to exist in the medical field as well.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#35

The article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full... It's worth noting that their false discovery rate was not study-wide, but rather group-wide. As they state at the very end of the paper, " FDR control was performed separately by group (e.g., severity level) to allow for group differences in the proportions of truly null hypotheses ". So, if you try to look at all significant P-value…

It's also worth noting that there is no clear causal relationship. There is a strong and well-established association between depression and inflammatory biomarkers, but we have very little idea of whether depression increases the risk of inflammatory illness or vice-versa. http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depres...

You'd think the answer would be easy to figure out. If you successfully treat the inflammatory illness, does the depression go away?

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#36
post #30

The article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full... It's worth noting that their false discovery rate was not study-wide, but rather group-wide. As they state at the very end of the paper, " FDR control was performed separately by group (e.g., severity level) to allow for group differences in the proportions of truly null hypotheses ". So, if you try to look at all significant P-value…

If you follow their methods, specifically [63], they are modelling the proportion of null hypotheses in their tests. Performing FDR by group is a reasonable approach, and does not necessarily cause P-value inflation. This is different from a Bonferroni correction, in which total numbers of tests done is the only factor. These FDR models of the proportion of null hypotheses rely on the distribution of p-values, not th…

Right. My point is actually that they're doing an FDR within each group, not across the whole study. So, the adjusted P values are accurate within each group, but to look globally, you either need to then Bonferroni or re-perform the FDR globally. I'm not saying that my point is in disagreement with yours, by the way, I'm just trying to clarify that my point is independent of whether they had done in-group FDR or in-group Bonferroni.

I actually built an online FDR calculator previously, since I enjoy the topic so much: https://tools.carbocation.com/FDR

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that there is no clear causal relationship. There is a strong and well-established association between depression and inflammatory biomarkers, but we have very little idea of whether depression increases the risk of inflammatory illness or vice-versa. http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depres...

You'd think the answer would be easy to figure out. If you successfully treat the inflammatory illness, does the depression go away?

> If you successfully treat the inflammatory illness

How do you know you completely succeeded?

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#39

[flagged]

Your assertion that "policy makers" are systematically withholding "solid information about your body" is paranoid nonsense.

I said nothing of the sort. Both of the replies to me seem to be reading in enormous amounts of bs that isn't in my remark at all.

Patients being informed about their condition is not all about people promoting snake oil. For some conditions, the patients themselves are often better informed than general MDs. Only actual specialists in the condition really know more and going to a general MD with no experience in their specific condition sometimes has catastrophic (even deadly) results.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#40
post #24
post #9

If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is…

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

Because as a society we can't spend ten million dollars on every patient with a hard-to-diagnose chronic condition that may just be stress. It just isn't practical.
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