EDIT:
MJF foundation is aware of it at least - https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/thiamine-vitamin-b1-and-par..., but points out problems with the study. Further Googling quickly leads to the usual quackery about the magical properties of different supplements and vitamins. Hope this goes somewhere though.
"Multiple randomized trials indicate that systemic corticosteroid therapy improves clinical outcomes and reduces mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 who require supplemental oxygen, presumably by mitigating the COVID-19-induced systemic inflammatory response that can lead to lung injury and multisystem organ dysfunction."
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/imm...
But yes, you're also right that it usually makes you more susceptible to infection because your immune system isn't working as hard.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5949415/
"Seventeen meta-analyses of these studies have been performed and have similarly shown conflicting results with some demonstrating a survival advantage (4-6) while other have not (7-10). Consequently, true equipoise exists with regards to the clinical benefit of corticosteroids in patients with severe sepsis and septic shock.
...
In summary, the use of corticosteroids in patients with severe sepsis and septic shock is not associated with improved patient centered outcomes, however this treatment is safe and without an increased risk of complications. Corticosteroids appear to have synergistic biological effects when combined with intravenous vitamin C and thiamine and may be associated with improved patient centered outcomes (21)."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8604467/
"In this review article, we reviewed a total of eight different articles being done in last 10 years, relevant to the clinical outcome and effects of corticosteroids. Among those, two demonstrated improved clinical outcomes, two showed both improved clinical outcomes and decreased mortality, three showed increased adverse effects, and the remaining one showed unequivocal results."
There is actually a good reason to think that steroids are beneficial in severe infections. This is because often in a severe infection/inflammation, a big portion of the damage is done by the inflammatory response.
Reading about the pathophysiology of influenza 13 years ago after H1N1, I came to this conclusion, and it was trialed, but good quality studies showed it to not be effective.
COVID has a slightly different pathophysiology and in COVID it works.
But yea, as a rule, it’s not a good idea to dose with steroids if sick
Everyone bangs in about the medical industrial complex, and points to either herbs and vitamins, or more recently ivermectin, or hydroxychloroquine.
Everyone conveniently just rolls over the fact that steroids (also patent free) were rapidly identified by a massive research study in the UK, became standard of care, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Is the pharma industry broken? Yes. Are there doctors who are conveniently leaving the cheap things on the shelf so a pharma company can profit off misery? Doctors are people too. In the most extreme form of this conspiracy thinking, apparently no doctors get or die from cancer. Just think on that for a second
The Michael J Fox foundation is more muted and says evidence is still missing. There have only been 2 trials and both were missing a placebo control group.
Only if a trial shows extraordinary consistent benefit without drawbacks would they stop it because the placebo group is harmed for lack of access to the treatment.
But the thing that stopped me generalising this was seeing second-hand that trialing a new treatment can be extraordinarily dangerous (and/or fatal).
Imagine being in the experiment group and the untested treatment being a catastrophic failure.
What are the statistics on that?
But I get it. My partner has an untreatable condition (like EDS, but without the genetic markers); they'd jump on any kind of hope, even experimental at this point.
Is it possible to get anywhere near this much with dietary thiamine?
High thiamine food stuffs have a few milligram at most so it would take some effort. However, many B1 vitamin tablets have 100mg-300mg, although I wonder how well that is absorbed compared with an intramuscular shot - it would seem that you could consume the equivalent of 200mg a week.
You mean something that's demonstrated to have a statistically significant protective effect in a majority of studies but was attacked mercilessly by the pharma industry and the media they fund because they can't profit from a generic drug like that? https://c19ivm.org/meta.html
Does horse dewormer do anything significant for large populations in first world countries?
No. (Save for regions with a intestinal parasite problem)
Elsewhere it gets rid of a significant number of parasites, making people healthier, and improving their chances WRT everything else, the common cold, influenza, COVID, etc.
If you have worms, take a dewormer course.
If you don't .. it won't do diddly squat for COVID.
Statistics!! (Sometimes there's correlation but that ain't always causal).
In the case of COVID in populations sans those conditions .. not so much.
I'm already dubious of the article you linked because the title uses appeal to authority (nobel prize winning) and emotional language (new global scourge).
I won't disagree that ivermectin improves life expectancy in some of those studies, but it doesn't seem to be effective in environments with less parasites.
Note also that it focuses on fatalities, not getting the disease, curing it faster than its natural course, or preventing it.
For a great meta-meta research, see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Specifically William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work developing a new drug, Avermectin.
From the actual press release from the actual Nobel Prize Committee [1]:
which was subsequently chemically modified to a more effective compound called Ivermectin.
Ivermectin was later tested in humans with parasitic infections and effectively killed parasite larvae (microfilaria).
Collectively, Ōmura and Campbell’s contributions led to the discovery of a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases.
The Nobel Prize press release that you yourself cite (although apparently have never actually read) depicts Ivermectin as a Horse Dewormer (see figure 3) - it also deworms cattle, humans, pigs, etc.
As a highly effective dewormer it is obviously positively correlated with health improvements in any large population with significant parasites - killing parasite improves overall health, more food eaten available for the host, improved immune responses, etc.
Hence the reason for many global studies showing positive results following Ivermectin treatments.
Hence also the reason quacks in the US started pushing propaganda about supposed effectiveness against COVID, setting up smoke and mirror site such as the one linked above, and spreading sly not quite untruths such as the Nobel Prize one you've repeated.
Do please read the original 2015 press release in full.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151005210425/http://www.nobelp...
Then you have Remdisiv, which definitely killed 10's of thousands of people, if not more. That's the real story of COVID, at least in the US. The countless people that were experimented on with one of the most dangerous drugs to be invented in recent times.
That something sounds strange doesn't particularly lead me to question the likelihood of efficacy.
The evidence on something's efficacy leads me to question something's efficacy.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Integrative and Complementary Medicine" is a fancy way of saying quackery.
Also, the video you linked to is on channel run by a person describing himself as "a certified functional medicine practitioner & naturopathic nutritional therapist [..]. He enjoys making videos on a wide variety of health-related topics ranging from nutritional biochemistry to circadian biology, animal-based nutrition, and the dangers of electromagnetic radiation."
No further questions, your honor.
Yes we should be cautious but no we should not dismiss. In fact I consider myself very fortunate for stumbling on this information as it may be very helpful for someone I love and I want to explore every possible way that can help.
There’s a reproducibility crisis in many fields of research, and medical research has multiple confounding factors, the “no prestige in just redoing the research”, lack of money for trying things that might fail to generate RoI for pharmaceutical companies, and the general medical research problems of clinical trails and ethics review and all the other stuff involved in good quality medical research.
Consequently this stuff gets thrown in the quackery bucket and ignored. It’s frustrating to see things that won’t hurt anyone to try again and properly debunk or expand the evidence for, winding up in an ideological trench war where the outcome is getting to enter round two of the “funding your actual research” trench war.
Presumably, because the more prestigious journals declined to publish it.
Why did all of them decline to publish it? There was probably a reason. Papers published in a quack journal does actually carry a signal about the quality of paper, IMO. No one turns down publishing in Cell or Neuron to publish in Donald's Journal o' Quackery and Crockpot Recipes.
Now most quack research is not particularly useful… but it can be made more useful to society if it’s used properly, we should be more willing to publish reproductions and failures to reproduce existing research, and we should be encouraging early career scientists in all disciplines to take this kind of quack research and to prove it wrong, it’s all there to disprove, easy done. We would get more critical thinking in our research students we would get more evidence to disprove other quack research and every now and then we might even stumble onto something good that would have gone ignored as just quackery for an unknown period of time.
If we want to fix the reproduction crisis we can’t ignore the shit research papers and only reproduce the good ones we think might work, we need to be willing to look at research like this, which invoices a pretty/relatively harmless high dose vitamin regimen that can be easily monitored by a clinician performing the research work (double blinds of course) and then we go from “idea that won’t be touched again and quacks try to convince people with flimsy research” to “idea conclusively proven or disproven and scientifically have settled the question without leaving reasonable doubts that can be used by quackery peddlers or others mis-using the scientific method for their own gain.
I'd much rather have the information in front of me so I can evaluate it and make my own determinations. If the parent commenter had their way I would've never seen this information. Now I can actually vet it out and do my own research.
I think it's infinitely more dangerous to deprive people of information.
This is the danger. Most people, myself included, are not qualified to make that determination alone. In this case, as expected, it looks like it was crap [1][2].
I'm not arguing in any way for censoring anything. But there is legitimate danger when people, often desperate, compare legitimate medical research, which will be subdued, with quackery, which will be ostentatious, and then, worst case, reject the actual medicine or hurt themselves trying to administer rogue therapies.
I don’t think it is a problem when people look at stuff, think it is interesting and try something relatively benign on themselves. For me the problem is when people start trying to play doctor without medical training or license.
That being said, I would say it’s unfortunately by necessity that people start trying to play doctor. I live in Canada, our healthcare system is currently in shambles such that it’s impossible to get timely care. Even the care we do get is time-limited and only focused on saving your life (which is great, but ignores the value of improving quality of life too). Also most of our medical interventions are so far behind the state of the art due to a Byzantine regulatory process that anyone actually trying to help a loved one with a health issue is forced to take matters into their own hands otherwise we fall through the cracks. The medical system is simply failing way too many people in Canada that it’s inevitable people Will take their health and the health of their loved ones into their own hands by necessity.
The journal, however, is bad. Looking for articles, the first I found claims that sounds of nature have a positive effect on gambling addicts, something unwarranted by the actual experimental conditions. The peer review and editorial process seem to be lacking.
The quackery label comes in not from the science but from the people behind it and the monikers / titles that they applied to themselves - unrecognized and not formally tested monikers / titles.
The formal testing is so that there's a proven and traceable minimum knowledge and background behind a person's statements. Like a bachelor's degree for a software engineer vs a two week boot camp.
The thread died without anyone actually checking if his algorithm worked or not.
Who knows...
If you've ever had someone in your family that might have had Alzheimers or Parkinsons you'll know what I mean.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/53111
Note, this was in mono-colonized gnotobiotic mice.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762356/
Another study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26505466/
> Conclusions: Administration of parenteral high-dose thiamine was effective in reversing PD motor and nonmotor symptoms. The clinical improvement was stable over time in all the patients. From our clinical evidence, we hypothesize that a dysfunction of thiamine-dependent metabolic processes could cause selective neural damage in the centers typically affected by this disease and might be a fundamental molecular event provoking neurodegeneration. Thiamine could have both restorative and neuroprotective action in PD.
This experience report of halting Parkinson's: https://youtu.be/iuSOQOTyB9w