Comment by fmjrey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fmjrey | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the recent interview of Pr Raoult who's been using chloroquine to treat covid-19 in France. Here's a google translated extract:

To those who say that we need thirty multicenter studies and a thousand patients included, I answer that if we were to apply the rules of current methodologists, we would have to redo a study on the interest of the parachute. Take 100 people, half with parachutes and the other without and count the dead at the end to see what is most effective. When you have a treatment that works against zero other treatment available, this treatment should become the benchmark. And it's my freedom to prescribe as a doctor. We don't have to obey government orders to treat the sick. The recommendations of the High Health Authority are an indication, but it does not oblige you. Since Hippocrates, the doctor has done for the best, in the state of his knowledge and in the state of science.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...

There's reason to be skeptical of him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Raoult#Ban_from_publish...

> In 2006, Raoult and four other co-authors were banned for one year from publishing in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology, after a reviewer for Infection and Immunity discovered that two images in a figure from the revised manuscript of a paper about mouse modelling for typhus were identical to figures from the originally submitted manuscript, even though they were supposed to represent a different experiment.

There are reasons to be skeptical of everyone!

The reasons are particularly relevant in this case.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/mo...

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/335/6072/1033

Again people not on the front line criticise those who are.

If you get infected, would you take it, or would you wait and see the result of the full study?

Now imagine having to take that decision not just for your life, but for your patients, and all the 200 staff that work in your hospital.

Another way to view the situation: you are a policeman stopping an ambulance not respecting the driving code and driving too fast, and then learn there is a dying patient in the back, what do you do?

> Another way to view the situation: you are a policeman stopping an ambulance not respecting the driving code and driving too fast, and then learn there is a dying patient in the back, what do you do?

Tell the ambulance driver to turn on the siren and party lights and have a nice day.

Like, there are already exemptions for ambulances driving "recklessly" as long as they're indicating (via siren and lights) that they're doing so in an emergency situation.

On that note, though, if the ambulance is driving too recklessly it might do more harm than good to the patient. It wouldn't necessarily be the police officer's place to make that determination, but it could certainly be a contributing factor for reprimanding the ambulance driver should the patient end up more injuries coming out of the ambulance than one did getting in.

Overall, a pretty poor analogy IMO, even if I do (to an extent) agree with your point.

Being "on the front lines" does not render your science immune to criticism. That's just not how it works. Doing good science is the only defense against rational criticism.

You're basically asking us to take his word for it because he happens to be treating covid patients. That is not a thing.

> Again people not on the front line criticise those who are.

The people on the front lines often don't have a great view of the entire battlefield.

There's a good reason the general is typically at a command post a ways back from it.

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