Court orders anti-vaxxer to pay 100,000 euros after lost bet

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

Nice speech. I think you're wrong, but it was nice.

It negates a very large possibility: that the person choosing the experimental treatment is fully aware that the treatment may not work and can have unforseen side effects and takes the action both because it's a chance they don't otherwise have AND if the Doctors can learn something, their largely unnecessary death or debilitating side effects at least did something.

Experimentation is always squiffy because historically it has been abused like hell. But we go full kiddie gloves in the other direction. We're so restrictive that a person cannot make a rational choice to pursue it in the same way we don't allow assisted suicide. We infantalize the actor by removing the right to any agency in a decision because we fear the ethics of the scientist. In the end, that's simply a shitty generalization on one side and society being too lazy to actually write practicable rules on the topic.

Meh... in the end I'm not like you Gravekeeper. I don't fear the boogeyman. I trust the greed of corporations exists and does me no favors but I trust my own ability to make my own decisions. I prefer the middle ground.

[Gravekeeper]

Nice speech. I think you're wrong, but it was nice.

Its not a matter of opinion. Would you like me to begin compiling a list of pharmaceutical companies with FDA violations? Just a cursory glance shows 437 companies. Thats before you get into lawsuits or revocations. Or even my own personal experience. As someone who was treated with an FDA approved drug that was later discovered to have potentially lethal side effects and was removed from the market. Some of the permanent side effects of which I still suffer from which were not originally disclosed by the manufacturer.

Also, people are not restricted from participation in experimental drug trials. So I don't know what you're on about. Doctors can also learn nothing from the application of an experimental drug outside of trial. So simply handing out an experimental drug is of no scientific value. Experimental drugs also do not have manufacturing processes in place yet nor avenues of distribution and thus are expensive to produce with limited availability. And that's before you get into the capitalism ho side of things such as corporate espionage if they just started passing out experimental drugs willy nilly.

There is no scientific, medical or economic benefit to what you're suggesting and what you're suggesting already has a middle road through experimental clinical trials. The availability of which are limited, yes, both because of cost and because they MUST be done in a controlled way to be of any benefit to anyone.

The FDA has been in place for over a 100 years. Do you really think you have more expertise in the field than they do?

Meh... in the end I'm not like you Gravekeeper. I don't fear the boogeyman.

I don't fear anything. I honestly don't fucking care if I get hit by a bus tomorrow at least then I get some decent sleep. So you can take your gross assumptions and shove them. You should know better than to make comments like this about others on Fratching by now.

[Panacea]

Ah I love the sweet smell of karma

One thing that's cropped up in recent weeks is the argument over whether homeopathic remedies actually work or not. One common complaint with that and with vaccines is that there has been (supposedly) no independently funded study into whether or not we actually need them.

My response to that has been "Some guy was able to crowdfund to have a potato salad party. Why aren't you able to crowdfund to hire a scientist, a lab and conduct your own damn studies?"

So far no takers.

We don't need studies on whether or not vaccines are safe and effective. We have between decades and hundreds of years of data telling us they are both, depending on the vaccine.

A study to compare homeopathy and vaccines would never get IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval because it is unethical to withhold a proven treatment for a placebo (which is what happened in the Tuskegee Experiment).

A common complaint of anti vaxers is the "lack" of studies between vaccinated and placebo. It will never happen for this reason. Homeopathy cannot be double blinded against vaccines because you are effectively giving a placebo.

And of course, anti Science Based Medicine folks love to complain about Big Pharma and the lack of research dollars to CAM therapies like homeopathy . . . while ignoring the fact that the US government does in fact waste millions every year on studies that invariably show no benefit from these "therapies" and also ignore the fact the supplement industry has shown no interest in funding studies of their own. Gee, I wonder why?

Short answer:

The FDA's hurdles are enormous and no project is undertaken without massive financial support. That $55,000 from potato salad guy might not get you to testing. Tufts has the cost at roughly 2.5 million for one drug. Vasigel, essentially a chemical IUD for dudes is being largely crowd funded and that still takes for flippin ever. Multiple drug companies point to those roadblocks as reasons why their drugs cost so much. -End short answer

This is not a bad thing. This drug could potentially permanently sterilize men who may eventually want to have children. There's not much information on this drug, and the fact it is being crowd funded makes me skeptical about it's early development. There is ONE peer reviewed article I could find, written by the inventor. Right now all we have is a claim and little precious support that this actually works. So don't expect this to come to market any time soon, at least not in the US.

Homeopathic remedies, of which there are plenty of fluff, are also home to things like St. John's Wort which eventually gets found to actually be an anti-depressent. The industry makes big cash, but with no monopoly the companies that make them don't have the type of R&D budget to study and much that is tends to be superficial, marketing driven, or given back in price discounts. That almost always leaves it up to curious University types.

This is a mischaracterization on so many levels. First of all, St. John's Wort has not been proven effective as an anti-depressent.

There is nothing stopping the supplement industry from doing real reserach on the active ingredient in St. John's Wort, to isolate and synthesize it, and then do the double blind studies to prove it is effective. They simply choose not to, and why should they when the FDA is prohibited from regulating them as long as they call it a nutritional supplement and not medicine?

If the studies on St. Johns Wort had proven it had any worth, Big Pharma would be all over it; they would be able to claim a patent once they isolated the active ingredient and turned it into actual medicine, doing the studies to prove safety and efficacy. They do this all the time; many modern medicines are based of natural products like plants.

It doesn't work. So they aren't bothering.

Those types of people could study those, or they could go after Pharma and they generally chose the latter because that's what Doctor's actually end up prescribing and therefore that makes it more helpful to a diagnostician. They are not incentivized to study homeopathy except by patrons that want a very specific answer and will scuttle knowledge of study if it doesn't say what they want.

Doctors prescribe medication because they're trained to use what actually works. They are limited by do no harm, and have a duty to the patient. Naturopaths (which is what you really mean when you say homeopaths in this instance) have no duty to care, are not bound by do no harm, and basically operate off of a belief system rather than empirical evidence.

Doctors don't scuttle knowledge of homeopathy, because there is no knowledge to scuttle. Homeopathy does not work.

I guess for me (having used both homeopathy and normal medicine), homeopathy is the land of snake oil, but it's also the land of a lot of remedies that are later vetted (specific use of Omega-3). It requires far more patient research, far more active engagement, and often worse results than Pharma. But at the same time, there are a lot of ailments out there that Dr.'s are shit at treating and lacking a better answer how to heal, they'll refer patients in that direction because help will exist, but none they can really prescribe and cover their ass if it blows up. That doesn't mean they don't realize it can help and many do.

Omega 3 fatty acids are not a medical treatment. They reduce risk of cardiovascular disease. They do not treat disease that is already established.

You admit that naturopathy leads to worse results than pharmaceuticals . . . so why do you continue to advocate them?

The difference between physicians and naturopaths is physicians will admit that they can't always guarantee a good outcome. Naturopaths never admit their remedies don't work.

Certainly certain homeopathy remedies have some truth to it. Vitamin C and Zinc can boost your immune system, and there are other vitamins and minerals that are not only helpful to your body, but essential to be healthy.

There is NO scientific evidence that Vitamin C or zinc boost the immune system.

Just because vitamins and minerals are essential to good health, doesn't mean they can be used to treat disease. They are not a substitute for actual medicine. Fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A accumulate in the body and can cause toxicity.

But no matter how effective these remedies are, it's never going to be a replacement for far more effective vaccines, medical procedures, and clinical treatments. Boosting your immune system is great if you want to slightly reduce the duration and severity of a cold, but it's not going to eliminate the risk that comes with more dangerous illnesses like measles. They're called supplements for a reason.

They're not a replacement for vaccines because they do you no good in any particular way other than to maintain basic nutrition. And you don't need a pill for that. You should be able to obtain all the vitamins and minerals you need from a well balanced diet.

It just boggles my mind how a parent can be so ignorant to, instead of following a trained doctor's orders to vaccinate their children, just give them supplements. And, of course, if the kid doesn't get measles, they'll use that confirmation bias as "proof" that it was effective. They call them supplements for a reason.

I hate to say it Huckster, but you're employing the same reasoning when you claim these supplements can reduce the duration of a cold. They don't. They don't do that at all. You're simply seeing the placebo effect and confirmation bias in action.

Yea, the Measles thing is definitely an outgrowth of the excess of not understanding something and then surrounding yourself with idiots or reacting against tone. Much of the loss of ground that occurred to the anti-vaxxer crowd was that the rhetoric for anti-vax was stupid, but the argument against pointed it out and it caused a lot of people to double down. Worse, it became Mothers against Doctors so you actually had this bs cloaked in feminist terms for a lot of people (hence a lot of them being liberal, not conservative.) The Doctor's were "ignoring" their studies and being condescending.

I'm not sure what else you could do, but how it got framed really helped f the whole thing up.

How else was the scientific community supposed to deal with this? They tried using reason and were accused of being shills for Big Pharma, in cahoots with an ebil government, and worse. They tried accomodating irrational fears, and it backfired on them; it just validated the woo.

Andrew Wakefield's study wasn't ignored. It was studied and disproven hundreds of times over, yet some parents still cling to it. It's become a religion, and these parents are fanatics of the worst sort. They are so crazy that they are getting laws passed that are endangering public health. Just what is the medical establishment supposed to do with the crazy?

But as for ignoring a Doctor? I get that. Doctor's can be wrong. Doctor's frequently are when it's not the sniffles. Many Doctor's are not as studious as you might expect. Some spent that energy in school and in the intervening 20 years they've been practicing they may or may not have stayed current And many patients get impatient dolling out $150 per visit to different people for 3 dissimilar opinions. It's not an industry that coordinates care well if you have anything more long term or doesn't have simple mechanics like diabetes. So eventually you do have people who stop trusting the industry, even if that's not entirely wise. It's really a case where you're at the mercy of who you've had as a Doctor.

It's hard to keep up with the peer reviewed literature if you are a struggling family practice doc relying on volume to keep the doors open. Granted, fractured care is a big problem in modern medicine. That doesn't make the medicine wrong, only the individual providers . . . from time to tome. The solution is to fix the system of perverse incentives to give doctors more time with their patients, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Well if you get right down to it, there is a debate that could certainly be had as to whether the procedures we force drug companies to adhere though are too safe.

That is, perhaps the cost would go down and more people would be served if trials required less animal testing and citizens were allowed to actually take on the risk of trials especially in the case of nichey diseases that don't really have great cures.

Absolutely more people would get hurt, but we currently consign people to die or poor health with these diseases anyway while waiting for elongated trials to occur. Perhaps a rational person would say, "yes I will risk death on the off chance that drug X will do what they're hoping it will."

Currently we deny them that option until some pretty severe testing has already taken place in multiple species of animal. I'm not positing a correct answer here, I'm just saying its sometimes taken for granted how much red tape we allow on the process.

We need the red tape. There have been too many instances where drugs rushed to market have harmed people. We know that Big Pharma cooks the books on clinical trials; publishing favorable results and suppressing unfavorable ones. The solution there is to require all clinical studies to be published. This is happening now.

It is unethical to conduct human trials of drugs when we're not sure what will happen to the people by not testing in animals first. Even when animal studies are done, human trials can be quite unpredictable. Look at what happened with the TGN1412 study if you want to see how bad it can get. This study is exactly why the FDA requires what it requires.

[fireheart17]

We don't need studies on whether or not vaccines are safe and effective. We have between decades and hundreds of years of data telling us they are both, depending on the vaccine.

A study to compare homeopathy and vaccines would never get IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval because it is unethical to withhold a proven treatment for a placebo (which is what happened in the Tuskegee Experiment).

A common complaint of anti vaxers is the "lack" of studies between vaccinated and placebo. It will never happen for this reason. Homeopathy cannot be double blinded against vaccines because you are effectively giving a placebo.

And of course, anti Science Based Medicine folks love to complain about Big Pharma and the lack of research dollars to CAM therapies like homeopathy . . . while ignoring the fact that the US government does in fact waste millions every year on studies that invariably show no benefit from these "therapies" and also ignore the fact the supplement industry has shown no interest in funding studies of their own. Gee, I wonder why?

Yeah, but you don't expect AUSTRALIAN anti-vaxx idiots to know this stuff now do you? Do you?! (I'm pro-vaxx FYI ) Hence my question. If they're going to shove some bullshit question in my face about a lack of studies, I'm going to ask them why they haven't funded their own.

Also re your last paragraph, someone actually tried to suggest today that the latest NHRMC report (National Health Council for Australia, I forget the rest...but blah blah GOVERNMENT thing. The report was about homeopathic remedies) was full of various errors and it was unscientitific and blah blah de fucking blah.

[mjr]

I saw something similar to this on a local PBS thing a few months back. Some guy was shilling a book and program about "micronutrients" during one of their "fundraisers".

I dunno if this micronutrient thing is real, but he seemed like a hack. It seems, based on a quick Google search, that I can get the SAME micronutrients from taking one of those Centrum vitamins, since based on what I'm reading, micronutrients means "vitamins and minerals".

http://www.drfuhrman.com/pbs

Problem is, when people talking about "dieting", many don't understand that "diet" just means "whatever I'm eating right now".

So when you "go on a diet", you're simply changing the diet you're on, by changing what, and how much, you're eating. Because you already have a diet, you're simply changing that diet, not "going on" it.

[Panacea]

Yeah, but you don't expect AUSTRALIAN anti-vaxx idiots to know this stuff now do you? Do you?! (I'm pro-vaxx FYI ) Hence my question. If they're going to shove some bullshit question in my face about a lack of studies, I'm going to ask them why they haven't funded their own.

I do this as well

Also re your last paragraph, someone actually tried to suggest today that the latest NHRMC report (National Health Council for Australia, I forget the rest...but blah blah GOVERNMENT thing. The report was about homeopathic remedies) was full of various errors and it was unscientitific and blah blah de fucking blah.

Yeah, anti-vaxxers have taken a page from Big Tobacco: deny the science. The use the appeal to reason fallacy. This is what you hear when you hear people talk about "the middle ground." There is no middle ground with vaccines: they work, they are safe, and the schedule is safe. But they think if they can gain a concession on the little issues, they can "disprove" the bigger ones later on. The more sophisticated anti vax trolls use this method extensively, and I've debated them heavily on science based message boards.

I saw something similar to this on a local PBS thing a few months back. Some guy was shilling a book and program about "micronutrients" during one of their "fundraisers".

I dunno if this micronutrient thing is real, but he seemed like a hack. It seems, based on a quick Google search, that I can get the SAME micronutrients from taking one of those Centrum vitamins, since based on what I'm reading, micronutrients means "vitamins and minerals".

Yeah, this guy is a fraud. There is no such thing as a "micronutrient," just nutrients. And we can get almost all of them from a healthy diet (iodine is about the only one hard to get, which is why we put it in salt).

The problem with most people nutritionally is that they eat too many processed foods, too much salt, and too much sugar, and proportions that are too big.

Smaller meals with fresh ingredients correctly balanced between grains, fruit, vegetables, and meats would fix the nutritional problems of most people. You don't need to do "juicers" or "detox," you don't need Adkins, you don't need vegan, and god save us from paleo.

Human beings are omnivores.

[TheHuckster]

There is NO scientific evidence that Vitamin C or zinc boost the immune system.

I can find a ton of resources, some from government publications that show a direct correlation between zinc and the immune system. If you're getting enough zinc in your diet, then obviously there's a cap where additional zinc will no longer help (or may even harm you) but depending on your diet, zinc supplements can bridge the gap between how much zinc you're getting in your food and how much you should be getting for your immune system to reach its full potential.

I'll concede that Vitamin C doesn't have an effect, though.

Just because vitamins and minerals are essential to good health, doesn't mean they can be used to treat disease. They are not a substitute for actual medicine. Fat soluble vitamins like Vitamin A accumulate in the body and can cause toxicity.

Yes, I just said that, and you even quoted me below on it. No need to "correct" me there.

I hate to say it Huckster, but you're employing the same reasoning when you claim these supplements can reduce the duration of a cold. They don't. They don't do that at all. You're simply seeing the placebo effect and confirmation bias in action.

Zinc is essential to the immune system and if you're not getting enough of it, you're going to have more lingering colds. If you do have a Zinc deficiency and you take supplements, it can lower the duration of a cold.

Yes, a well-balanced diet can get you there, too, but not everybody has a well-balanced diet, either due to will-power, digestive problems, allergies, or food disorders.

[Panacea]

I can find a ton of resources, some from government publications that show a direct correlation between zinc and the immune system. If you're getting enough zinc in your diet, then obviously there's a cap where additional zinc will no longer help (or may even harm you) but depending on your diet, zinc supplements can bridge the gap between how much zinc you're getting in your food and how much you should be getting for your immune system to reach its full potential.

I'll concede that Vitamin C doesn't have an effect, though.



Yes, I just said that, and you even quoted me below on it. No need to "correct" me there.



Zinc is essential to the immune system and if you're not getting enough of it, you're going to have more lingering colds. If you do have a Zinc deficiency and you take supplements, it can lower the duration of a cold.

Yes, a well-balanced diet can get you there, too, but not everybody has a well-balanced diet, either due to will-power, digestive problems, allergies, or food disorders.

Zinc doesn't lower the duration of a cold by helping the immune system, though. It interferes with the ability of the virus to replicate itself. It only works if given within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms, and the data on prophylactic use is very weak. Your own article says this; you've misunderstood what you've read. A Cochrane review on zinc might clarify things: http://www.cochrane.org/CD001364/ARI...he-common-cold

Yes, I understood what you said, but the reason I corrected you is because you have conflated what vitamins and minerals actually do with what you think they do. I clarified if anything.

It is very rare for people to need to take vitamin supplements and their actual usefulness is heavily debated in the medical community. Willpower is no excuse to not eat healthy. Money is, but since food is less expensive than vitamins, there's still no excuse.

Given the variety of foods available, you can still get your dietary needs met with food even if you have allergies. Only if you have a malabsorption disorder should you need vitamin supplementation. That's very rare.

Eat healthy, and save your money.