Comment by bsder

Comment by bsder 3 days ago

> Our society's morbid, irrational fear of quack medicine

It is not an irrational fear.

Brandolini's Law applies: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."

The only way to prevent quackery is to cut it off hard before it gets started.

Wakefield demonstrated the disaster that happens when you don't.

(And if you have been reading this site for very long, you know the experimental treatments are already around--we're not currently lacking for possible cancer treatments. The problem is finding the trial. Then the problem is getting people through the process and then getting them to the trial. See: "Please be dying, but not too quickly": https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...)

A_D_E_P_T 3 days ago

Even if I grant that argument, what I've described isn't even quackery. It is legitimate medical research and experimentation, and what doctors in olden times would call a "heroic" intervention -- but, sadly, now this sort of thing has become collateral damage in the war between medicine and quackery. And patients are the ones who die and suffer because of it.

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bsder 3 days ago

The general public, as a group, cannot identify quackery. People died from bleach and horse dewormer to prove this. The continuing career of Mehmet Oz also demonstrates this.
There will always be more malevolent actors looking to take advantage of people than there are benevolent actors able to protect them. Standard rules and laws are an attempt to at least protect the majority of the people the majority of the time. Like anything, rules are never perfect, and you have to weigh the limitations against with the benefits.
As someone who has literally trawled the cancer trial databases for people, lack of trials is not the main problem--finding the appropriate trials, on the other hand, is terribly difficult.
If you really want to help people, apply AI to help common people search all the public cancer trial filings to connect up the patients and the doctors. That would do far more good, far faster than changing laws and rules around last ditch experimental treatments. You won't become rich, but you'll help medical science a lot, and you might even save a life here or there.

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