Like trying to treat his cancer with ivermectin?
Doesn't seem to have worked.
Doesn't seem to have worked.
My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
It's not when you need it that you start googling around
People who put barriers for assisted suicide (like our politicians in France) are heartless bigots. Or did in other words - assholes.
Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.
I mean, we had that and threw it away; centuries of memento mori in various cultures and religions
They do. For example "US army sunk a boat with drug traffickers, killing everyone."
see Banality of evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
Per article (and not arguing it's effective for human oncology), there are also studies with mice showing effectiveness.
From figure 1:
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
Ok, that looks interesting.
As I mentioned above (another comment), pharma tends to avoid developing applications for generic/cheap drugs so we may not see more research on this front. Who knows.
If there is a x5 improvement they will get a method to package both drugs together and sell them for x10 the price. You surely want a profesional mix in the high tech lab instead of a random guy mixing tubes in the back room. Another trick is to add something to the molecule like a methyl -CH3, show that the new version is 10% even better and charge x20 for it.
So my guess is that there is some problem to use this mix, but as I said I can't find any obvious error and it's really interesting. I'd love to read a better analysis from someone that is an expert in the area.
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
Hasn't failed me yet.
a) Ivermectin in the best hospital in the capital city of one of our most poor provinces in Argentina
b) The average in the same poor province
I don't expect too many problems with parasites there. They implicitly decided that the difference was ivermectin, not that the hospital is probably x10 better than the average of the province.
Doble blind randomized controlled group or it didn't happen.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
>layperson to worry about, either.
We're not talking about laypeople without money nor access to pursue. Adams had money, access, and desperation.
Society would love to put this to bed, but pharma typically avoids funding RCTs for out-of-patent/cheap drugs so we may never get the answer.
You didn't know that?
But over 90% of drugs that show promise in rodents flunk out in human trials.
Something working in rodents is an indicator that it might be worth doing testing to see if it works and is safe for humans. But if you bet against it panning out, you'd still be right the overwhelming majority of the time.
The only thing you can project from rodent trial success is that it is worth continuing to study. It should not guide any human usage at that point.
I now understand you were being sensational with your prior language:
> Projecting human outcomes from rodent studies is 100% quackery
90-95% of them don't pan out! And that's of the ones that progress from rodent studies to human trials. The actual number is even higher, but more difficult to track.
Surely you can see how it would be absurd to extrapolate success from something with, at best, a 5-10% chance of panning out? And panning out as in being approved - lots of things that are approved have less than 100% success rate, particularly in this area.