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Comment by glynjackson | Hacker News Reader

Quote: "By the end of the year, she had received just six doses of the drug instead of the usual twelve. Marette responded just as her doctors would have hoped from the full drug amount."

I'm sorry, at this point I stopped reading. The Doctors don't know how she would have responded to the full drug, because it didn't happen! The word 'hoped' is not testable! Where was the control (Quasi-experiment)? There is just not way to tell if she would have responded better, for all we know she was 50% better than she could have been if she'd taken the full 12 doses. Or maybe 6 doses was just the right amount for her.

I do believe that the brain is a powerful tool and have read research that shows we can change things like body heat, pain and more with mind, but this story did not have anything that evaluated the impact and cannot be used as evidence of such!

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I think you can just take that to mean that the response (around some reasonable window) for the real drug was indistinguishable form the non-drug response window, with the assumption that a previous use of the real drug was too far away to account for the non-drug response.

Yes, that's an assumption you should further clamp down later because of such extraordinary results, but it's not unreasonable to make it, especially since it would be really strange for the earlier real drug to cause all its effectiveness spikes right when the non-drug is taken, and in the same amount as later uses of the real drug.

Hmm I'm pretty sure that 'hoped' in this case means something like: "Well, in a normal case we would have recommended 12 doses of the medicine in order to get a full recovery."

This is not like testing stuff with a computer program, you can not reset the human to a known state and replicate the experiment all over again.

Following your logic, even all vaccines are a lie, how can we know that the vaccines that we take every year are doing anything?

>Following your logic, even all vaccines are a lie, how can we know that the vaccines that we take every year are doing anything?

peer reviewed double blinded placebo controlled trials, this is an anecdote.

> Following your logic, even all vaccines are a lie, how can we know that the vaccines that we take every year are doing anything?

By having a basic understanding of the scientific method and control groups.

There are many, many ways to test! A control group, quasi-experiment evaluation etc. "Correlation does not imply causation". All she has is a hypothesis, a theory based on observational research, while this is ok, the article tries to pass this off as 'fact'.

I'm not staying I disagree with her 'hypothesis' but, people should require evidence before accepting it as fact. Maybe if she have quoted studies, instead she used well know experiments to justify the hypothesis. When the one experiments she did quote by Sergey Metalnikov even concludes...

"The difficulty for the investigator lies not so much in inducing such responses, but in employing the proper controls, both immunological and psychological, in order to demonstrate that these responses exist and to explore the underlying mechanisms." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3908/

I guess a book entitled "What I think" would not sell as well.

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