Cheap antidepressant shows promise treating early Covid-19

Check this random factoid out: "After about two weeks of 2,400mg NAC supplementation, cigarette usage appears to be reduced voluntarily by around 25%."

I personally take it for my liver. It does wonders to it, similarly to silybilin.

I have M.S. What herbs did she take?

I'm so, so glad I can finally downvote friend-of-a-friend rumourmongering like this. Maybe this is something legitimate, but handwaving an entire anecdote on a forum like this, with no definite information except "a case" involving "a woman" and her "condition", is baffling.

Maybe don't listen to this user's suggestions about NAC without verifying something about it, which was too much trouble for them.

I did more than that: I pointed out not only the use of weasel words but also that no assertion is substantiated in what boils down to a baseless appeal to authority.

Consequently, it's critical that, for the sake of objectiveness and to avoid spreading misinformation, these personal assertions cannot be backed up by handwaving and instead must be supported by concrete evidence, such as references to said studies, if they exist at all.

Actually it is. The whole point of that was to illustrate the importance of actually looking into what these papers actually said, if they exist at all, instead of pulling the appeal to authority card with numbers pulled out of thin air.

The OP asserted that ivermectin worked. He proceeded to state that 60 papers report it. Well... Where are they? Can anyone like me actually take a look at one of these supposedly decisive papers? I'd be happy if I could just check the best one out of the hypothetical 60.

This is only really accurate in a small window of analysis. It's been shown that paracetamol + ibuprofen has synergistic effects for most pain-related issues and paracetamol is superior to ibuprofen for migraine headaches; furthermore, the obvious correct headache drug of choice is aspirin/paracetamol/caffeine, aka Excedrin, which is vastly superior to ibuprofen.

I won't argue that paracetamol has acute liver toxicity issues (the largest drug of overdose problems, though a lot of this is intentional rather than accidental), but ibuprofen is abused in a chronic fashion with buildup over time leading to renal failure and worse (pro/amateur athletes are particularly at risk of chronic abuse issues).

I won't argue that paracetamol is way more dangerous than people think, and there should be far more warning labels (which J&J fights against), but I would be genuinely shocked if it got its approval revoked; similarly, I'd expect it to be approved if it was around today as well - especially if we knew about the synergistic effects it has with aspirin and caffeine.

Unfortunately, it means just "trusting a peer reviewed study" is even harder than it should be. You have to dig into the study to see if it even makes any sense which can be very difficult. And you have to follow the money, not "even" if the study says what you think it ought to say, but especially when it says what you want it to say.

Very disappointing when you go digging in.

Complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) are treatments that fall outside of mainstream healthcare.

> Are the people participating in the scientific studies of the drug participating in alternative medicine?

Well the placebo group taking sugar pills for their cancer are not exactly going 'by the book' or lamestream healthcare and the active group taking whatever ... well lets just agree to disagree shall we?

Please let me know when a reputable study that undergoes peer review in an established and respected journal reports that the drug does work as their fans and militants claim.

Until then, keep in mind that "alternative" in "alternative medicine" stands for "hand-waving". As the old adage goes, alternative medicine that works does have a special name. It's called medicine.

Off label drug use/ approval isn't about government liability. As far as I know, it has none. The noteworthy exception is the vaccine's, where the government has a special injury compensation fund, but I wouldn't call this liability . It IS about manufacturer liability, and insurance reimbursement.

That's very very unlikely. Even considering the Nobel prize for it. Simply because the sheer scale of the pandemic.

There are more vaccines in development and use against COVID than there are Ivermectin clinical trials in total.

> they’ve been deployed for longer and at least passed phase 1 trials, which the vaccine has not (only preliminary results).

That doesn't mean they are not safe. The phase 1 trials run to 2022 Nov, because there's a long follow up period.

Nothing can guarantee that there's not some mysterious missed interaction. It's probability is low and getting lower day-by-day. This tail risk is just not that important for safety. It makes very little sense to emphasize this, because we also don't know the long term interaction of Ivermectin and COVID-19.

There was a single hypothesis being tested here.

So now you are faced with a conundrum. You made sure that it has an effect to the degree you wanted. Now the math says that you either might get even surer by continuing the trial, or save 30% people from hospitalisation.

Also in treatment group just one person died while in control it was 12.

So what's it going to be? Making little bit more sure or saving few lives?

OP is asking other posters to do quite a bit of homework for them... As in, "Is this study big enough?" <<YES>> "OK, but how big does it need to be to prove X?" ... At a certain point, it seems clear that OP is not arguing in good faith, because they feel compelled to make the critical statements, first, without understanding the topix.

I would caution you to not extend sympathy to OP's cause, simply because you happen to share a critical eye for this study. There is a HUGE difference between being right for the right reason, vs the wrong reason... and that's how we get crap like Ivermectin for COVID.

https://xkcd.com/882/

The essay you linked is very good, but it's actually illustrating my point... The mouse study ran into bias problems because they had to go and directly measure something in nature, and then turn that into a number. That introduces several opportunities for error.

But this SSRI/COVID study isn't doing that. They're literally just looking at patient records, and counting hospitalization vs current SSRI usage. They're not picking up mice to count ticks... They're exporting records to a spreadsheet, and summing columns.

Now, these guys might have problems with the quality of the records they're relying on... Who knows whether the records are accurate or not. But that's a problem of data quality, not experimental bias.

You might say "Who cares? Either kind of error undermines the results, just the same!" But it definitely suggests that the other guy doesn't know what he's talking about... Because if he did understand stats, he would have used the right terminology.