81–90 of 98 posts
it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Irreproducibility is not the same as fraud. In any case, I would support high-risk research - stuff that may not be repeatable - if it has a high direct ROI, economic spillover (USA has a big biotech/pharma ecosystem), and leads to cost savings (e.g. no more dialysis machines).
Yes, exactly. Defund the junk science, the circles that are put around the results and called targets, and all the questionable research activity until merit has returned to scientific research and the vast majority of empirical studies can be replicated without p-hacking it.
Edit: as a follow up (because I feel like I strawmanned you), I am just trying to say that p-hacking is not always malice or incompetence. Sometimes limited methods/theory miss confounding variables, sometimes labs lack resources, etc.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Just look at that MAHA report. Exactly the sort of thing you would expect when you ask an AI to support something false. A human generally recognizes when a search throws up a totally false hit. And, in general, the right hits show up in the results before the wonky stuff--but when you're searching for something that doesn't exist, or doesn't exist in a web-readable form all you get is the wonky stuff. But the AIs don't have the ability to recognize they're in the garbage and distill it out so you no longer see it's pedigree. But it's still garbage.
It's questionable if the health secretary even believes that germs are real, so this checks out. Unfortunately, as a county, once you set a poor governing standard like this, it's hard to recover back to where we were. Biology is not convenient nor does it follow the ruling political parties platform. The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions.
That or they would rather simply ignore biology in service of this or that politically-motivated special interest, and put off any problems for the next generation to deal with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If use of a drug had no, or very little externalities, id agree. Overuse of antibiotics creates resistant bacteria, endangering everyone. I am forced to disagree civilly, sir.
A large portion of antibiotic resistance comes from patients taking a partial prescription, feeling better, and discontinuing the rest of the pills. In that situation (the only one at this time), is the majority of resistances are made. Controlling the supply, especially if you know you have a bacterial disease, can be solved readily. In fact, on a camping trip, I was bit by 15 ticks. Was bad. When I got back to civi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this sounds like it's a really bad idea for the government to fund. What's to stop someone who happens to have made it in the ivory tower go crazy, spin up some kooky ideas that are highly risky and just blow taxpayer money on something not really accountable?
And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually m…
Two words that explain why it hurts everyone else when you can go buy antibiotics whenever you want (you think you have strep): Antibiotic Resistance. Longer explanation: how do you know exactly which bacteria you’re infected with, and which antibiotics will work well against them, and which ones they’ll throw a middle finger at? Even if you have the exact same symptoms as the last time, how do you know that taking t…
This is great and all but it ignores that getting an antibiotic prescription is not difficult at all. I literally just get in a video call, describe the symptoms of strep, and they write me a prescription. It's less expensive to treat than to test. In 15 years I've never had a doctor actually test me for what bacteria I actually have. They sometimes do the bare minimum of looking at it to be pretty confident it's bacterial but that's about it.
However stupid you think the general populace is, doctors count themselves among their numbers. Your average urgent care or primary care doc is just going to give the same broad spectrum antibiotics without any real thought. Except for the one bona-fide MD who looked at my very obvious case of strep, knowing from my chart that I have chronic bacterial sinusitis, and me telling them as much, looking at my puss filled tonsils and concluding that it's allergies and that I should take Claritin. Never go to urgent care man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large portion of antibiotic resistance comes from patients taking a partial prescription, feeling better, and discontinuing the rest of the pills. In that situation (the only one at this time), is the majority of resistances are made. Controlling the supply, especially if you know you have a bacterial disease, can be solved readily. In fact, on a camping trip, I was bit by 15 ticks. Was bad. When I got back to civi…
You're not really saying that the populous would finish more courses of over-the-counter antibiotics, are you? Prescriptionless antibiotics would almost axiomatically make that worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not really saying that the populous would finish more courses of over-the-counter antibiotics, are you? Prescriptionless antibiotics would almost axiomatically make that worse.
I actually kind of disagree, when you can get more at any time there's no reason to want to save any of them.