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Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

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Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#371

Post by rscho »

blindmute wrote: post #360
rscho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a doc. I am also a medical researcher, but you (and most other people here) _have_ to realize that the vast majority of practicing MDs are _not_ scientists, and understand almost nothing when reading medical studies. And that's fine, because it's not their job. The profession is bound by guidelines and expert opinion. Experts do research, formulate guidelines, and guidelines get applied by practitioners. And no,…

As someone who is actually an expert in a subfield of medicine, not only do doctors not understand it at all, but the experts making guidelines often recommend the exact opposite of what is the best treatment for the patient, usually for liability reasons, but occasionally for true lack of understanding. The quality of research is so poor that often times there are more flawed studies showing X than proper studies wh…

I'm not saying that experts are doing a stellar job or that they're special in any way, far from it. I have slaved enough under 'true experts' to know the extent of the catastrophe. We even had a truly spectacular example of failure at the start of the pandemic with the 'intubate early and withhold steroids' expert opinion. This particular one, I won't ever forget.

What I'm saying is only that:

- on average, experts do spectacularly better than Joe Schmoe. Including science degree holders thinking they understand medical studies while missing the whole political and social context of the field.

- it's not the job of field practitioners to prescribe experimental therapies, and those people cannot do better than follow expert opinion and guidelines.

But I actually agree with you on all points, especially regarding flawed research and understanding. Which makes people basing opinions solely on papers without any practical knowledge of the field wrong all the more often. Does it make it a good idea for people to go and try on their own the thing they read about in the last issue of 'covid today'? I don't think so.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#372

Post by blindmute »

jacquesm wrote: post #146
roenxi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is only a fallacy when you are an expert as well... This is wrong to the point where you really might want to take a deep breath. The point of experts is they have thought about a field more and are better at making sound arguments in that field. "Most scientists/doctors believe..." is literally, exactly and unambiguously a fallacious argument. The only thing that matters is why they would believe that. And if t…

No, if you are not a doctor your opinion on any of this doesn't matter at all, it's that simple. Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things. You may be better at interpreting the statistics than your doctor friends but you are not better at medicine, are not wired int…

>No, if you are not a doctor your opinion on any of this doesn't matter at all, it's that simple.

>Probability dictates that any doctor - let alone most doctors' - opinion trumps yours and everybody else that parrots you, because they will be right far more often than you about medical things.

You really have not spent much time around doctors, I think. Doctors (GPs) know about as much on a topic as someone who Googles the current country guidelines. For anything novel, I'd trust a statistician over a GP to interpret data every time.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#373

Post by shkkmo »

jacquesm wrote: post #210
gardnr wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many serious anti-Ivermectin arguments in the past I haven't seen any of these. I just run into irrational and offensive people like you that accuse me of wanting to drink bleach when I bring up the topic of Ivermectin. This article removed all doubt for me. I needed to see the thought process while pouring over the studies. You shouldn't make so many assumptions about people based on your political bias. Some peop…

> Some people want to understand. So go study medicine, assuming you have 10 years to burn and are willing to take a massive pay cut. The average HN'er probably knows how to program a computer and some of them may even know how to program one well. If a guy that runs a fishing boat with not even the most basic idea about programming, hardware, software, satellite systems, general relativity and integrating all of the…

The argument you are making is directly addressed in the article.

> So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught.

> But also: one of the data detectives who exposed some fraudulent ivermectin papers was a medical student, which puts him somewhere between pond scum and hookworms on the Medical Establishment Totem Pole. Some of the people whose studies he helped sink were distinguished Professors of Medicine and heads of Health Institutes. If anyone interprets “trust experts” as “mere medical students must not publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes”, then we’ve accidentally thrown the fundamental principle of science out with the bathwater. But Pierre Kory, spiritual leader of the Ivermectin Jihad, is a distinguished critical care doctor. What heuristic tells us “Medical students should be allowed to publicly challenge heads of Health Institutes” but not “Distinguished critical care doctors should be allowed to publicly challenge the CDC”?

I think it is horribly demeaning to respond to someone asking how GPS work by saying "you can't try to understand without years of training, just trust us." That is exactly the kind of response that alienates people and fosters mistrust.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#374

Post by hef19898 »

reissbaker wrote: post #222
croon wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a blogger who took time out of their day to do this. Why do you have to be catered to to be convinced? The blogger didn't produce any new data, it was already there, you chose to ignore it, or rather, picked something else to be convinced by. It's not bullying or "talking down to" to simply ignore bullshit, it's effective use of your time.

The blogger didn't produce any new data. I was never an ivermectin proponent — although I thought the "horse dewormer" rhetoric was self-defeating, because it's obviously and well-known to be also a human dewormer (amongst other parasites), and the "horse" part just seemed to be played up to make ivermectin supporters look stupid — but this article is indeed the first one I've seen to make the parasite-COVID-comorbid…

Considering how many people are actually using hose doses instead of those intended for humans, I guess that characterization isn't too wrong.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#375

Post by CountDrewku »

RubberMullet wrote: post #293
EdwardDiego wrote: post #37

My step-son was recently prescribed a small one off dose of ivermectin by a dermatologist to deal with a rather resistant case of scabies he acquired at a sports tournament. It took the pharmacy a couple of days to source, because signficant controls had to be put in place around prescribing it due to well, I'm just going to say what I think - the amazing capacity for the Internet to deliver dumbassery to people who…

[flagged]

No they're not. That's you being biased against information you dislike and then justifying its "falseness" by attaching whatever -ist label makes you feel better.

Thinking that white supremacists and Nazis are running all over the place in 2021 is pure bs propaganda being pushed by our media.

Is your point here to suggest that belief in alternative COVID treatments means you're a racist bigot?

Proof please.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#376

Post by tzs »

rmbyrro wrote: post #179

> Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. To me such slogans are a disservice. Science should not be a matter of belief by definition. This way of promoting science is what brings belief-centric discussions to an arena that cannot benefit from beliefs. I remember one presidential debate in the US wher…

> I remember one presidential debate in the US where the interviewer asked Trump: "Do you believe the science of climate change?"

> Making such question is an absurdity and reflects the almost religious way these subjects have been considered lately.

What question would you ask to ascertain someone's state of mind on climate change?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#377

Post by mikeyouse »

beagle3 wrote: post #184
jacquesm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for every story like yours - and I know of a few of those - there are examples of people who were absolutely convinced that their child had 'x' or 'y' when it in fact wasn't the case. It is great that you had the perseverance to see this through, and unfortunately it isn't rare at all that local medical care is not up to speed with rare diseases or misdiagnosing a rare disease as a more common one. I lost a siste…

Indeed, the oath is a theatre prop and not much more. I reside in Israel these days, which has a system similar to NL ttbomk. The doctors that treat you (in the public system) are not incentivized other than to cure you, except perhaps through the occasional marketing cruise. But high up ministry of health people have been indicted (including through corona) for pushing and in some cases mandating useless treatments…

This is a good example of how ill-equipped most people are to forming their own opinions about things this complex.

The WHO recommends against using remdesivir in hospitalized patients -- which is very different from your claim! The FDA and others make their cutoff point slightly but not substantially later, e.g. remdisivir isn't indicated when a hospitalized patient is on high-flow oxygen. Their disagreement isn't one of substance, just one of scope, and all doctors treating Covid know the rationale behind each cutoff point.

But instead any of that nuance, people say things like the "WHO disagrees with FDA" and decide that both are useless so they should take medical advice from morons with podcasts?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#378

Post by hef19898 »

csee wrote: post #192
qqqwerty wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the correct answer to wait for more reliable studies? Which is what most "anti-ivermectin" folks were saying to begin with? If your primary goal is to have a miracle cure in hand that would allow you to push back against vaccine mandates, then this approach probably won't sit well. But if you are interesting in actually finding truth, than waiting for larger, more robust studies was the answer.

Why wait? Why not take ivermectin as a precautionary therapeutic given it is well tolerated with low risk of side effects? There's a chasm between the epistemic question of "does this drug really work?" and the pragmatic question of "does a risk-reward analysis under uncertainty say that I should take this mostly safe drug that might slightly reduce my covid severity?" FWIW, I wouldn't take ivermectin either as a pro…

Why not using a de-wormer against a virus? Well, because that's what vaccines are there for. And we do have rather effective ones by now. All of which have a low risk of side effects as well.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#379

Post by jmull »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #257
271828182846 wrote: post #252

> All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. Well, as a German I feel obligated to recommend those officials to read up on Josef Mengele and then reconsider throwing that name around so casually.

Blame the Twitterati for the normalization of calling people "Nazis" over slight political disagreements.

It's a Twitter thing now, but it might be useful to understand that it predates Twitter.

E.g., "Goodwin's Law" is supposed to have been coined in 1990, and of course it was a pretty well established phenomenon to earn a coined term.

I know from first-hand experience it was happening on BBS's and newsgroups in the '80s. I would be more surprised than not if it wasn't happening before then too.

(And if you want to generalize slightly, calling someone a Nazi is simply a current way of demonizing your opponent. People have been demonizing their opponents since well before there were Nazis.)

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#380

Post by hindsightbias »

deelowe wrote: post #336
romeros wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHO has no other option than being inaccurate. Society needs a simple answer. Do this. Do that etc. Put on a mask. Wash your hands. Practice social distancing. Use approved vaccines. Take booster shots etc are pretty simple to follow. Likewise don't take non approved stuff. Easy to understand and simple to follow. Nuances will likely hurt and confuse the common man. That's why the news and celebs and politicians etc…

The public is much more capable of processing and understanding nuance than we give them credit for. It's just not as profitable for the MSM.

I find HN to have quite a strain of absolutist thinking. Even when Scott rethought some of his SSC vs NYT positioning, the mob would have none of it.
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