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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

#71

Post by robocat »

With a meta-analysis, if you detect a high number of fraudulent studies, shouldn’t that negatively affect your trust of the studies which you didn’t detect any problem with?

Let us imagine you looked at 100 papers, and you could tell 99 of them had severe problems, and one looked OK. That information would make you suspicious that the one paper also had severe problems, but that you just didn’t detect the problems.

From article: “We’ve gone from 29 studies to 11, getting rid of 18 along the way. For the record, we eliminated 2/19 for fraud, 1/19 for severe preregistration violations, 10 for methodological problems, and 6 because Dr. Meyerowitz-Katz was suspicious of them.”

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#72

Post by bayesian_horse »

roenxi wrote: post #57
bayesian_horse wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is little evidence of such analysis being suppressed. I think it is just relatively rare, because it is a lot of work and takes particular skill. Most people who care about this research are indeed crackpots, unfortunately. Those who aren't have mostly moved on from Ivermectin because they have better things to do. Ivermectin is being tested in large RCTs, as it should. If it works, it will be used. If it doesn…

Going through one of those studies from https://ivmmeta.com/ on YouTube would be a risky proposition for a YouTuber. It goes against YouTube's medical misinformation policy [0]. It is pretty clear that a study with that sort of effect size could encourage someone to take Ivermectin. Particularly the "Categorical claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19 " would be a worry depending on how the cens…

Nope, it's not against the medical misinformation policy.

But that's a fine point in that case. And most people who talk about these studies will violate the policy by a wide margin, rather than doing a well rounded analysis.

You can't deliberately encourage people to take Ivermectin. But JUST citing a study wouldn't do that. Especially not with all the debunking of the other stuff.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#73

Post by jacquesm »

roenxi wrote: post #65
jacquesm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been following with some amazement the number of conspiracy peddlers on HN for the last 18 months or so and one case of conversion isn't going to make me overly happy. It is a bit like the story about the lie getting halfway around the world before the truth puts their shoes on, in the extreme long term the truth will come out, meanwhile, the damage is done. This guy until yesterday wanted his mother to take som…

You could try spreading the truth instead of bullying people? I do care about my mothers health you know. And if a doctor isn't convinced by a large number of studies I want them to explain why not rather than call me a conspiracy peddler. The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it.

If you care about your mothers' health then you shouldn't engage in quackery.

> The way someone gets ivermectin is to walk a doctor through the evidence they've seen and then ask them to prescribe it.

That is factually incorrect, no doctor in their right mind will allow the patients to effectively prescribe their own controversial and in some cases downright dangerous medicine.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#74

Post by panny »

roenxi wrote: post #14
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, ivmmeta.com will get passed on from person to person that wants to sustain their delusion and the website here will be preaching to the choir.

I changed my mind. I was making pro-Ivermectin comments just yesterday. This is the first serious anti-Ivermectin argument I've seen.

>Ivermectin doesn’t reduce mortality in COVID a significant amount (let’s say d > 0.3) in the absence of comorbid parasites: 85-90% confidence

That simply armchair science blogging psychiatrist's hypothesis. He even admits as much,

>But this theory feels right to me. It feels right to me because it’s the most troll-ish possible solution. Everybody was wrong!

None of the studies looked at worms. It is correlation == causation logical fallacy to conclude this based only on speculation. If you want to start arguing with that approach there is no bottom as there are just as many correlation == causation counter examples like https://i0.wp.com/noqreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/I...

You simply cannot dismiss that Ivermectin only works because worms until you have studies proving that. You can only say that it works, but you're not sure about why. Good to see that even after he cherry picked all the studies as hard as he could, he still had to reach this basic conclusion.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#75

Post by lolspace »

> This is from ivmmeta.com, part of a sprawling empire of big professional-looking sites promoting unorthodox coronavirus treatments. I have no idea who runs it - they’ve very reasonably kept their identity secret

Why are they hiding their identity? That means that it can be anyone who does this.

-----------------

But even more important. The website also claims that each of the following individual medicines works:

Fluvoxamine

Proxalutamide

Iota-carrageenan

Molnupiravir

Quercetin

Povidone-Iodine

Curcumim

Casirivimab

Sotrovimab

Bamlanivimab

Nitazoxanide

Budesonide

Zinc

Bromhexine

Colchicine

Vitamin D

Aspirin

Favipiravir

Hydroxychloroquine

Remdesivir

Vitamin C

I find it unlikely that all those claims are true which in turn makes me question their scientific approach.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#76

Post by jacquesm »

robocat wrote: post #71

With a meta-analysis, if you detect a high number of fraudulent studies, shouldn’t that negatively affect your trust of the studies which you didn’t detect any problem with? Let us imagine you looked at 100 papers, and you could tell 99 of them had severe problems, and one looked OK. That information would make you suspicious that the one paper also had severe problems, but that you just didn’t detect the problems. F…

A good rule is to simply wait. Bad science has a way of being negated over the longer term. But if you want results today you could always try to replicate the experiment (which is one of the reasons why asking scientists to show their data in raw from should be mandatory in my opinion).

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#77

Post by mewpmewp2 »

robocat wrote: post #71

With a meta-analysis, if you detect a high number of fraudulent studies, shouldn’t that negatively affect your trust of the studies which you didn’t detect any problem with? Let us imagine you looked at 100 papers, and you could tell 99 of them had severe problems, and one looked OK. That information would make you suspicious that the one paper also had severe problems, but that you just didn’t detect the problems. F…

Depends on what would be the supposed cause of the fraud? What would be the motivations?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#78

Post by jacquesm »

nzmsv wrote: post #58
bayesian_horse wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Most scientists/doctors believe it to not work against Covid-19" wasn't a serious argument for you? It is a strange phenomenon that people are so ready to disagree with people who spent decades achieving exactly that kind of knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Are you suggesting that we didn't adopt his methods?

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#79

Post by jesterson »

jmnicolas wrote: post #24

Interesting read, I appreciate that the author isn't dogmatic and is open to discussion. However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth. Pfizer and Moderna combined are making more than $…

> However I think he misrepresent some anti-vaxxers: it's not a matter of trusting science, it's a matter of trusting scientists with heavy conflict of interest to tell the truth while most of us don't have the required scientific knowledge to evaluate if they're telling the truth.

That's an excellent point - unfortunately people who are easily labeled as "anti-vaxxers" and perceived as uneducated anti-scince crowd quite often happen to be the people who just don't digest unsubstantiated narratives easily, which actually is a right way to listen to people and companies with potential conflict of interest.

A number of people (myself included) would perhaps pay less attention to ivermectin as in covid drug if crowd would really take it and do studies instead of just publicly mocking people who are trying to look into it. That attitude makes people think there is an agenda behind and big pharma revenues makes all of us think it's not entirely untrue.

Regrettably a lot of people related to science forget that science is not a blind belief in authority but actually quite the opposite - question authority in everything.

Re: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

#80

Post by roenxi »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #72
roenxi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through one of those studies from https://ivmmeta.com/ on YouTube would be a risky proposition for a YouTuber. It goes against YouTube's medical misinformation policy [0]. It is pretty clear that a study with that sort of effect size could encourage someone to take Ivermectin. Particularly the "Categorical claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19 " would be a worry depending on how the cens…

Nope, it's not against the medical misinformation policy. But that's a fine point in that case. And most people who talk about these studies will violate the policy by a wide margin, rather than doing a well rounded analysis. You can't deliberately encourage people to take Ivermectin. But JUST citing a study wouldn't do that. Especially not with all the debunking of the other stuff.

> Nope, it's not against the medical misinformation policy.

"I have reviewed these studies, they seem sound and there are no real downsides to taking Ivermectin. I can't think of any reason not to take it. I don't recommend taking it, maybe I haven't thought of something" is a position a reasonable person could come to after browsing through the available evidence. Are you absolutely sure a video like that would be kosher on YouTube?

It sounds extremely disingenuous to me, just typing it out.

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