Re:Study of the effect of Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B...
by conistonwater on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @11:21AM
(#23391962)
I think this is wrong: Ioannidis's major point is that a lot of studies in medicine are underpowered (a similar issue to the replication crisis in psychology), leading to a lot of false positives. But there is no reason to think that this would be the case for a study that finds a vitamin deficiency in the population. We can expect no issues with p-hacking or garden of forking paths just because there is no place for them (the researchers are not looking for crazy-small interactions between vitamin levels and one of many possible outcomes, they're just recording the vitamin concentrations), and we know roughly the right concentrations for those vitamins too.
So I think this is misplaced skepticism, you shouldn't really dismiss studies so easily without thinking through the issues first. This would be much more relevant if the research was specifically about some random compound's small effect on Covid-19 without a prior reason to think it would be relevant at all - then the problems would indeed appear.
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Re:Study of the effect of Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B...
by stainforth on Tuesday June 02, 2020 @11:52AM
(#23392381)
And yet your tactic was the same in effect - your wall of text utlimately tries to lead us to dismiss this post and any research at all. You want the reader to stop thought.
Remember that half of all research papers are probably wrong and most of medical research is wrong, according to John Ioannidis:
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" by John P. A. Ioannidis:
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Lighter reading on this topic:
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" by David H. Freedman (who later wrote an excellent book on this topic, see below for link):
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-da...
"A Researcher’s Claim: 90% of Medical Research Is Wrong" by Maia Szalavitz:
https://healthland.time.com/2010/10/20/a-researchers-claim-9...
And in these days of COVID, HCQ, Remdesevir, crisis, civil unrest and crime I cannot recommend enough David H. Freedman's book titled:
"Wrong: Why experts[1] keep failing us"
with the subtitle
[1]"Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more"
https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship-cons...
Freedman examines thoroughly the issues that John P. A. Ioannidis has raised.