NoPie

Sometimes they do search on travel agency website and accept the option, not realizing that at this point they could have booked directly from an airline's website.

I am too very happy with cheap airlines including Ryanair. It is true that their customer service may not be brilliant but they make it more affordable to travel. I think it is a reasonable compromise that benefits us all.

There is more to this story than it appears.

If you book via a travel agency you sometimes may find poor service in case you need some changes. A friend needed to add a luggage to the booking and the travel agency refused to help. He had to do at the airport for double price.

He couldn't do it online because making changes in Ryanair booking requires some information how the booking was made, for example, the email address. He was unable to obtain any of this information from the travel agency.

If he had known that he was able to update booking's e-mail address though this process of online verification, he would have saved at least 40 euros (minus €0.59 online verification fee).

Ryanair couldn't have made adding luggage without requiring at least some confirmation that it is done by the flyer. If you check online and proceed directly to the gate, you may not be aware that someone (a terrorist or drug smuggler) has added luggage to your reservation, checked it in luggage drop point and collected it at the destination airport without you being aware.

Of course, Ryanair could have a different business model where they don't charge double price for adding luggage at the airport. But that's the whole point – their business model reduces need for staff at the airport and thus they can offer lower prices.

But this would not be an issue, if travel agencies were providing better service too.

Maybe it has some risks but probably not greater than risks we accept every day.

Maybe slapping a mandatory warning or something should be enough for most people to make an informed decision.

Have you looked at Cochrane review?

The population was told that masks certainly work, in certain areas mandates made sure that compliance is very high >95%.

If we still could not find reliable evidence that masks are effective, then the policy makers should be told that.

There is very little you can do to improve mask wearing technique. We certainly explained these things to doctors, it made no difference in results. If you want to make more controlled studies, you can do that. Don't hold your breath however.

No, we should not continue requiring wearing masks because you are only doing that out of hope. That's not how we do things in medicine. It would be unethical. There are many medicines that show effectiveness in the lab but fail in clinical trials. We don't demand for those medicines to be used until we find more effective alternative. Many unknown factors could cause ineffectiveness in clinical trials, we don't need to understand all of them, just the fact that the drug failed to demonstrate effectiveness and safety in real life settings.

>> a more accessible alternative which is also as effective as masking becomes available

The point is masking was not effective. It has not shown effectiveness anywhere in the real world.

That is generally not true.

In fact, often clinical trials are statistically analysed by intention-to-treat, including all people who have been randomised even if they later don't receive the treatment.

Per-protocol-analysis (including only people who follow the study protocol) can also be used but it is more prone to bias.

Besides, with masks it is not simply wearing or not wearing a mask. Even a very diligent mask wearers may wear it in a way that makes it less effective without being aware of that.

In short, when the doctor prescribes a medicine it is important to understand the factors why the patient may not take the medicine as prescribed. If the real life situation is that most people take medicine in a way that makes it ineffective and so much that the clinical trial cannot find significant effect, then he shouldn't prescribe it. It is just a waste of resources and giving people false hopes.

The first answer is too vague to have a meaningful answer in case.

Every other treatment in medicine including schizophrenia is tested how it works in practice. It is incurable disease and the treatments have many side-effects. Thus the question becomes not “does this medicine cure schizophrenia” but “does this treatment works better than placebo or another treatment?”. When studies are completed, we gather evidence by monitoring real life experience with this treatment.

The first question is pointless for someone responsible for public health. People want the answer to it because they don't want to think about all these related issues and have simplistic idea that they can protect themselves. But chances are their compliance is exactly the same as among people in those studies.

Therefore the real question is how effective is the intervention. It will be (or should be) asked by people responsible with public health policies.

P.S. Cochrane group is not for giving scientific answers to individual people. Its main aim is to evaluate the evidence of different treatments and provide guidance to policy makers and healthcare authorities.

Cochrane review doesn't make this distinction.

In medicine you cannot distinguish. It is all about the intervention and not about some theoretical best-case scenario.

The intervention is to ask people to wear masks. People comply as they do in real real life and then we measure the results. There was no reliable evidence that this made any noticeable difference.

Now you can change the intervention – instead of asking and mandating masks as we did, we could educate masks wearers more. Unfortunately we have no evidence that it helps.

Perhaps masking could help to an individual wearer? Alas, we didn't collect such evidence either.

Some studies are lab based. In those masks had some effect. But that's not how people use masks in real life, so these results don't mean much.

Why everybody asks Ukraine to negotiate with Russia and give concessions to Russia instead of asking Russia to negotiate with Ukraine and give concessions to Ukraine?

This one-sided approach seems strange.

The title is misleading. The article does not reject existence of willpower, just discusses a different theories about it.

Addictive substances show that in some cases chemicals can affect willpower.

It could still can be explained that the brain processes the pleasure gained from heroin as more important than the possibility of early death. However, different drugs have different addiction-forming potential which could indicate at least partial chemical influence.

Not denying that secondary infections is a big killer, 2 groups of 50 patients is not a big number.

Also, maybe the patients initially were different that allowed them to recover from a secondary infection or not. It doesn't say much whether a different approach treating these infections would have helped. It might but still remains to be demonstrated. A proper RCT is needed.

Besides, it seems that covid has changed, now almost everyone has been vaccinated or infected, so people have some seroprotection, a different strain is less damaging. The results may not be applicable to potential future outbreaks of covid or other respiratory infections.

I am sorry but I didn't say that Cochrane review shows that “masks don't work”. I said that we “have no evidence that they work”. Most people don't even realize the difference therefore Cochrane published the explanation.

As far as recommendations go in medicine go – thing can be recommended only if they have evidence. The review found that we don't have such evidence.

That's because those other restrictions in Sweden were minor compared to those in the UK and Spain that they don't even seem worth emphasizing. It would make an impression that they were somehow comparable. They were not.

To me it sounds you are discussing minor details. 15% of people voluntary masked on public transport? Tell that to Spanish who were refused travel on public transportation if they didn't mask until very recently till February, 2023.

Public libraries were closed but you still could get books? It is annoyance compared to what happened in other places.

The problem here is not that Sweden had some minor restrictions. The problem is that the restrictions in other countries caused great harm with very little gain and that we still haven't acknowledged that.

According to the Cochrane review, we don't have evidence that masks worked. This assertion makes the report less trustable.

Vaccines have high level of evidence. Closures probably don't have any evidence at all.

Apparently the theory that Ukraine posed the threat to Russia's government is incorrect. Russia attacked because it wanted to occupy Ukraine and convert Ukrainians into Russians.

Yes, but how are you going to achieve that? If the country wants to attack another country, why would they even agree to this?

Isn't enforcement the whole point? If Russian soldiers were not able to enter Ukraine, there would be no war.

Because it is impossible to do that. See, even China did those measures that helped but ultimately they had to give up. They simply lost time unnecessarily.

Just like any other big projects with government's help.

I live 20 km from a new nuclear power station being build. If my country can do these projects, why not others? You are right, we need political will but the political will comes from people wanted them to be built.

That study is biased because it has no proper control group.

Individually you may protect yourself with the mask (if you think it is worth it) but that's not how the policy makers should look at things on society's level. If most people will not/won't be able to use masks properly, then its effects will be very low.

If true and most people inside in China wear masks, what does it say about mask effectiveness?

He said that it was, for example, “daunting [for] even a fair-minded person with the world’s best technology and infinite staffing budget” to distinguish between appropriately sceptical vaccine research and conspiracy theories that charge “the people who make these vaccines are just trying to get rich, even [if] they cause net negative health effects”.

The debate against lockdowns and vaccine mandate was shut down and apparently with the help of the US government. That is unacceptable, even anti constitutional and in no way it makes one far-right. In fact, in Europe activists against lockdowns and vaccine mandated were coming from the left.

For practical matters in the hospital, they are not.

Because people did a bunch of small, poor-quality studies that seeded to show improvement. But when we did larger scale, properly controlled, randomized studies, where we gave people vitamin D, it didn't show much of an effect.

And yet people persist in different theories why it is so. I don't know the mechanism, but randomized, placebo-controlled studies currently are gold standard in medicine. Their results are much more trustable than many observations studies. Sometimes we cannot do randomized studies and observational studies is all we can do but if if we can and research report only observational studies, I take with a big dose of salt.

Vitamin D is obviously necessary, mostly for bone health, but any study of supplementing it for other purposes to people without any symptoms of deficiency have been disappointing.