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Comment by tdeck | Hacker News Reader

I stopped listening over a decade ago for this exact reason. Dr. Oz (I prefer to think of him as Mr. Oz) has been a friend of the show for years, but this is the episode that put me over the edge:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-power-of-poop

This guy claims he can cure Parkinson's with a fecal transplant and they just let him frame the conversion and the medical community's skepticism however he wants like it's a given that he is a misunderstood genius. It was so obvious the hosts lacked the basic tools of skepticism. Now if you look up that doctor 13 years later he's been promoting ivermectin as a cure for COVID which is totally on brand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Borody

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Cure is a strong word but there's plenty of research which supports ivermectin being effective against COVID.

https://c19ivm.org/

The medical commmunity will almost always be skeptical of new theories, sometimes this is well placed but sometimes it isn't.

That's neither here nor there though, the main takeaway is you probably shouldn't go to economists for medical advice.

Please don’t spread ivermectin conspiracy theories on HN.

I'm mostly just trying to provide Thomas Borody the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he would do a much better job of defending himself.

If if you click through for meta analysis of most of the drugs listed, it claims a statistically significant reduction in mortality. That seems incredible.

I'm not an expert but gut checking against this chart https://c19early.org/plot/bpall.png

  1. The exercise, diet, sunlight, zinc, and vitamin d results all seem plausible. They are well known to improve your immune system.

  2. Remdesivir was originally recommended for covid19 but then they stopped using it. I'm surprised the plasma has such a poor result because that was heavily hailed originally too.

  3. Paxlovid and HCQ are both widely recommended, in line with the results presented.

So as far as I can tell (which isn't far!) it seems like a reasonable analysis.

The main point I wanted to make is Borody is far from alone in being interested in c19 and ivermectin.

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