VanJordan said...
You were already dubious, so colour me shocked. Feel free to disregard his findings and not invest yourself at all in the theory because of petty observations on study design. I've been in remission since March using this theory. I'm a biochem student and the science is not hard to apply to my health.
These are not petty observations. Treatment efficacy is overestimated in unblinded studies. That's why standard medical trials involve randomization and blinding. Most clinical trials also follow up on patients for longer than 8 weeks (usually 1 year...).
There's nothing wrong with papers based on case studies as opposed to large scale trials. The problem comes in extrapolating the results from a very small number of patients, or 1 patient, and then making grandiose claims about
cures.
One other thing, less important. I read more abour the "refractory " patient of 39 years who is discussed in pravda's 2020 paper. It says "Over the years, the patient received various forms and combinations of oral and rectal 5-aminosalicylic acid (enema and suppository), rectal steroid preparations in addition to immunosuppressive agents (6-mercaptopurine, oral steroids)". In other words, he never tried biologics. Describing him as refractory would be appropriate 20 years ago, but not today. As I understand from the paper, they have no data points between the first study and 12 years later. This makes it hard to know what his UC has done in the intervening time.