Glucosamine significantly reduces risk of lung cancer and lung cancer mortality

RCTs are great but can have problems with generalizability to real-world conditions. Ideally you'd study both.

In theory, these observational findings could suggest treatments that should be evaluated in a randomised trial. I am not actually sure this is true however, it is possible they are less useful than selecting interventions for further testing in some other way. Anecdotally, folk remedies may have a higher hit rate for selecting treatments for proper evaluation. This is often surprising - eg a precursor to aspirin is found in the Willow tree, which has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. Another example is the foxglove plant from which the heart drug digoxin is derived, which was used as a herbal medicine predating modern medicine.

All science needs to be published. Pilot studies, observational studies, quasi-experimental studies. Otherwise, we don't have the information we need to create randomized control trials.

However, I'd strongly support keeping all that science from being publicized.

Because things other than randomized studies produce the results that generate the funding for randomized studies.

Another: not all research can or should have randomized studies (like it just wouldn't make sense if you were, say, determining the structure of a protein). So drawing the line as to what does and doesn't need a specific approach is blurry, and really, can only be enforced during the peer review process, or by the editor.

On the other hand, this kind of work can still serve as a hypothesis generator. Someone else will read this, think, "well they did this all wrong!" and perform a better study that clearly demonstrates whether it has an effect or not.

But when I looked up what "case control, test-negative" means, I found that it is observational, and there is no intervention provided to any of the individuals. Some of the recent discussions of the design indicate that it is understood by scientists, but can mislead laypeople, who assume that its conclusions are much more robust than they actually are.

We should definitely continue to do research of many types, partly as a way to figure out where to spend the time/money to do RCTs (which are more expensive than other types of analysis). But we need people reporting on studies to be very clear up-front when they are not describing an RCT. They should say what the study's conclusion means, versus what it would mean if there were a similar 'finding' in an RCT. Otherwise people will not understand that they are being told a weak conclusion, not realizing there is a strong conclusion that has gone unmentioned.

Yet we want to do research in these areas. So we have to make do with what's possible.

The problem is when it gets printed in mainstream press who sensationalize and then posted to reddit/hn where people go 'duh this is obvious, this is a dumb thing to study', 'sample too small', 'not controlling for income/confounding'.

asking because you only linked to the homepage of a general data portal which itself reports its no longer being updated,

versus to a study supporting what you're saying

I don't understand how the source you shared supports this claim*. If anything, it shows the opposite - you're at far higher risk of death if you're unvaccinated. And that's after considering the fact that unvaccinated people are likely to be younger and fitter.

The unvaccinated have, at best, half as many deaths per 100k as those who are fully vaccinated + booster (in reality, the two lines mostly track each other). Which sounds good, until you realize that the unvaccinated make up only 9% of the population. 33% of the deaths coming from 9% of the population - healthier, they are not. Delusional, would be more correct.

* I'm assuming "getting COVID" here means "having serious consequences from an infection" as opposed to merely being infected. The vaccinated make up the vast majority of the population, so it's obvious that they are also at the highest risk of being infected by COVID. There are very few unvaccinated people left for the virus to infect.

Im sure this will be different in areas where there is no public awareness of a risk factor vs ones where there are. Eg healthy diets select for people who care about their health, so it's not so infomative, vs something where the link is not publicly known (so that the observational study is already somewhat blind/randomized).

As such, the general bias against publishing non-significant results could mean the conditions for being able to even try such a review risk biasing the review towards exaggerating agreement.

(It also seems the Cochrane review here may itself only be considering other reviews - a metameta analysis of sorts – which might also be influenced by a selection bias, if there’s any chance at all that researchers choosing work, & then publication decisions, prefer to address questions where there’s more agreement, rather than less-attention-catching mixed results.)

The most convincing evidence here would be how strongly preregistered RCT results, whether ever published or not, tend to match earlier observational studies. It doesn’t appear to me that this Cochrane review is focused on that.

It might be more 'lay person' than you are looking for, but it's an excellent read for myriad other reasons, so you wouldn't be wasting your time (IMO).

Generally, I don’t think we know enough about how metabolite levels translate to specific complex carb levels because there’s a relatively complex set of intermediate steps which themselves can be regulated.

It is amusing you should say ways that avoid reaching the brain. The blood-brain barrier impedes a large number of therapeutics from entering the brain. It is incredibly difficult to engineer the constraints of something that: is potent enough to have an effect, can survive in the blood, cross into the brain, targets the cells of interest, has a meaningful half-life, does not decompose into something toxic, etc.

https://www.nei.nih.gov/learn-about-eye-health/eye-condition....

Inflammation is correlated with many conditions, so I would not be surprised to see other correlations, or that it was combined with other inflammation reducing agents.

https://www.seriouseats.com/spanish-style-garlic-shrimp-gamb...

Seriously. Get some good shrimp, some garlic, and go to town on some crusty bread. It's one of the recipes I'd still eat even if it took time off my life, it's just so damn good.

That's not the best argument if you are trying to debunk CCP conspiracies: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167

and ephedrine..

I don't put much stock in the reasons behind why a lot of TCM works, but dismissing the whole thing out of hand is folly, because essentially you are saying plants have no medicinal value and massage is a waste of time.

I would push for more scientific rigour within TCM to come up with better models of why some of this stuff works instead, which to the best of my understanding isn't even a particularly controversial statement in many TCM circles.