Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exporectomy | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, whatever the duration, you'll eventually stop vomiting some time after taking the medicine. Sometimes by chance it will seem like a remarkably short time from medicine to cure compared to the duration of the sickness. This is how a lot of ineffective traditional medicines "work". For a cold or nausea, nearly everyone will experience their problem fixing itself after taking the medicine and combined with cultural beliefs, use that to convince themselves that the medicine treated the disease. Just look at the number of people online who credit some (real) medicine with some outcome despite the fact that they have no way of knowing causation. Or young people who say "I don't drink FooBar type of alcohol because it makes me vomit." after one occasion getting plastered and ending up vomiting. It's good old mind-tricks of correlation vs causation.

There's a reason real medicine requires preregistered double blind trials. It's just far too easy to get causation wrong without using rigorous scientific methods.

"Yes, whatever the duration, you'll eventually stop vomiting some time after taking the medicine."

That's a gross oversimplification. You could continue to vomit. You could also die. There are multiple types/causes for vomiting. Not all vomiting simply stops on it's own.

"It's good old mind-tricks of correlation vs causation."

I'd say this is more than just mind tricks. The study shows there's a strong correlation and evident effects, which suggests studies should be done on the cause.

"There's a reason real medicine requires preregistered double blind trials."

Or in this case a grandfathered status (it is a "real" medicine as it is approved for sale). I also think this is, again, only a half truth. Double blind studies tend to provide the strongest evidence, but they are not the only kind of study accepted for drug approval.

Mostly vomiting stops on its own and people don't die. Even when someone dies, it won't break the beliefs of survivors because they don't believe it works 100% of the time anyway. In your case, you even took an ineffective dose of Emetrol but still believed in its effectiveness despite that! How many ineffective doses would it take for you to not credit Emertol with stopping the vomiting?

If there's a scientific study, that might show something better than the giant fail-fest of cultural medical knowledge. I don't know of any human society that hasn't at least historically had a bunch of ineffective medicine that was widely used. Even modern western society probably has some - such as this Emetrol perhaps or wrong results of drug trials. An extreme case is China where normal doctors in hospitals routinely prescribe herbal remedies alongside conventional medicine.

The dosing isn't based on a single dose. Obviously if you vomit it up before the initial dose has time to work, then you need a second dose.

Did you look at the study linked in these comments? Or are you just going to go on and on about cultural medicine and mind tricks?

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