Some examples: aspirin (willow bark used for thousands of years, drug synthesized in 1897 and mechanism explained almost 100y later), or general anesthesia used again since mid 1800s and the mechanism is quite still debated.
This is not to downplay all the long term, or developmental, risks that using something novel can result in. But we can empirically know something about the effects without having good mechanistic models.
Anyway, I don't think we really disagree, I rather misunderstood your original post. It's good to hear that these new peptides are helping with your condition, and I wish you all the best!
As a fun aside, consider the effect of the birthday paradox on empiricism, as the pool of candidates grows larger the probability of a match increases substantially as potential matching candidates increases quadratically.
Particularly when the mechanism behind most of these peptides comes down to "promotes more rapid cell growth". The intent may be to repair the skin, muscles, or ligaments, but biology is rarely that specific.
Doctors, like many professions, have institutional blind spots, I studied these in my search because I was looking for something that had not been found. Most doctors have to consider all people and all conditions, I only have to be concerned with one.
Notably they only recently adopted Bayesian statistics for medical trials despite that math being around for hundreds of years.
ME/CFS research is severely underfunded. The reasons for this are not simple, it's partly due to the complexity of the disease which, as cynical as it is, does not make it an attractive research topic for ambitious scientists. Same goes for "Big Pharma". Clinical trials for ME/CFS are extremely complicated, and hence expensive, due to the myriad of symptoms in how the condition can appear. It makes research in this area very difficult and expensive. There's very little funding for ME/CFS research, and that needs to change. Unfortunately, especially in the US, this is not going to happen for Kennedy reasons.
The Bayesian statistics thing is a bit of red herring, though. While your are correct that the math is old, the needed compute resources for doing Bayesian modeling on large trials was simply not there until recently. But it is also correct that it also took a long time until there were official rules regarding this from FDA and EMA. These regulatory things move very, very slowly.
The UK led the world with explicit psychologizing of it in large part to prevent insurance companies being liable for such an expensive and debilitating condition. A legacy that continues to this day, the main people responsible are still very influential. Fauci was instrumental in diverting research away from the autoimmune aspect and preventing a lot of important research. The $1B set aside for LongCovid appears to largely have been wasted. The official classification for hEDS was explicitly changed to reduce the number found so that it could remain a rare disease and continue to have access to specific funding for rare diseases (goal seeking). I could go on and on. It is a highly dysfunctional industry with many perverse incentives pulling it in all sorts of directions. There was the healthy at any size movement despite obesity being a massive cause for mortality, perhaps the only stronger signal would be smoking and consider how long it took them to figure out smoking.
There have been insanely impressive improvements to medical science but this seems to be largely due to tooling and access to information rather than the lumbering bureaucracy which appears to do very little of benefit.
Yes they will miss rare cases or where symptoms aren't quantifiable or where no understood biological mechanism exists. Yes you can take on research and treatment yourself with the risk associated. No a bunch of anecdotal evidence on experimental treatments do not substitute for structured research. No you won't come back here in 3 years if you develop serious side effects that would have been identified in clinical trials and tell everyone you were wrong.
So I’ve been doing this for over 4 years now, and commenting on this with this account for a bit less than that, so far no serious unwanted side effects other than the usual ones for semaglutide which went away. Of course that has a survivorship bias but in the forums people do often tell others what they’re about to try and we would notice if they stopped showing up.
There is always tension between objectives in real-world systems. There are essentially two frontiers in our healthcare system--a core of educated professionals that are conservative and move slowly with ample evidence behind decisions, and a wide range of laymen who are comfortable with personal risk (e.g. bodybuilding community). I have respect for both, and they work together. The core will always have too many false negatives and the horizon group will have too many false positives. Saying the balance right now slows things down too much needs more support as an argument, there will always be things on the roadmap for medicine and there will always be edge cases that can't get addressed perfectly
From what I've seen medical researchers are champing at the bit for new areas of treatment that they think are promising and they just need the smallest amount of convincing evidence to research. If they don't have it for something you think is valuable, collect the information in a systematic way and find someone to send it to.
This is a deeply unfair statement, and also a false dichotomy. Medical science is of course empiric. What you call "fundamentalism" is that compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people. And no, it's not just because of Thalidomide. Many, many compounds fail clinical trials because of severe side effects, like liver toxicity, severe immune reactions or heart problems. Then there's of course increased risk of cancer, which can take many years to manifest itself empirically. You argue that you prefer living with these uncertainties rather than ME/CFS, and that's of course entirely understandable, but disparaging the field of medical science as focused on "fundamentalism" because we do not give large patient cohorts untested compounds is polemic. I understand where you are coming from, and I'm sorry that you suffer from this terrible condition, but likewise, you should try to understand the other side.