Comments on: Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations

By: Tiedeoopiumia kansalle | Nörttitytöt

Tiedeoopiumia kansalle | Nörttitytöt — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 05:00:55 +0000

[…] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/25/beware-mass-produced-medical-recommendations/ […]

By: Kevin

Kevin — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 23:42:22 +0000

Aaaaand now the infographic on the linked page (at informationisbeautiful.net) no longer shows Vitamin D as having “strong” evidence… it’s been demoted to “promising.”

Huh.

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By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 21:53:49 +0000

It might be useful to note in the main post that you distinguish between people who have a deficiency of (for example) vitamin D, and those who don’t. It wasn’t clear to me until I read your comments that you made this distinction.

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By: Half Pint Olsen

Half Pint Olsen — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 20:30:58 +0000

Thanks for the analysis! I needed this.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 05:23:35 +0000

Yes, there are scenarios in which they’d get a better diet at home, but I’m skeptical that’s typical. How about you survey your clients on whether they ate more vegetables at home?

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By: Julia

Julia — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 04:43:36 +0000

Re: institutional diets: people often don’t like the food an institution serves them. (Observe kids in any school cafeteria.) The tray may be fairly nutritious if you actually ate the whole thing, but someone who gets broccoli instead of the peas they would normally eat at home may just avoid vegetables altogether rather than eat something they didn’t choose.

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By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 19:43:59 +0000

Huh! I never knew that was possible.
Cool.
Or, well, not cool, exactly, but interesting.
And it answers my question. Thank you!

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By: Henk Poley

Henk Poley — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 06:25:04 +0000

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_serous_retinopathy

Where liquid comes out of the blood vessels under the retina (sort of bleeding, more permeable).

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By: Andre

Andre — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 04:09:54 +0000

I dont understand the niacin study. They gave people extend release no flush niacin along with two other drugs. how is that a fair study to make any conclusions about niacin? the oinly thing that proves is that extended release no flush niacin plus those two other drugs cause strokes and other bad things.

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By: gwern

gwern — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:36:06 +0000

I was surprised by the large number of tiny studies. Lots of studies with n < 100. Why do these studies get run?

Lots of reasons. People don’t do power analysis. They do it, but wrong and with highly optimistic values. They do it correctly, but can’t get funding. They stop early when some metric hits significance (both peeking & adaptive trials). They stop early when something goes wrong, an investigator leaves/dies/gets-bored, a funder stops funding. (Funny example: while I was googling trial sequential analysis to understand that particular vitamin D meta-analysis, I went looking for R code to see if maybe it would be useful for my own meta-analyses; one of the discussion threads I found was… someone having issues because their drug company had been acquired, was not interested in funding their clinical trial to completion, and wanted to stop halfway through.)

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