3 ms·

Posting this link on nearly every study which is not in your subject area is beyond tedious. I cringe every time I see it. Ask the question - have their been a

Posting this link on nearly every study which is not in your subject area is beyond tedious. I cringe every time I see it. Ask the question - have their been any well designed studies with nootropics - by all means, but enough's enough. If you have no subject matter expertise, don't make claims about lack of good studies. It's like the morons spouting "correlation is not causation". Sure they are right, but the first step in good science is to create a model, the second step is to test it for causality. In the meantime the best we have is correlational studies. The alternative is just to believe whatever your biases allow. Diminishing the result of the study (which is often the implication of posting that link in my opinion) is just showing a lack of understanding of how good science iterates between induction and retroduction over time. BTW: There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic. 2500 with piracetam. Even a cursory look may be useful in the future.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 17y ago
There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic. To ask the question you suggested asking, which of those are well designed studies? (And to follow up with what is my concern, which of the better designed studies show an objectively measured improvement in cognitive function over a reasonably long span of observation?) Which studies, if any, make a positive case for meaningful effect with a good safety profile of nootropics in human patients? Citations would be greatly appreciated from any reader who has citations available. I will look them up. I checked the Cochrane Reviews yesterday while this thread was first active.
- corruption 17y ago
  Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that? My assumption when reading a study is that it is well designed. I trust in the scientific establishment vs random people on the internet, but are fine to be proven wrong when I read the methodolgy. Even a cursory look at the wikipedia page or some of the meta analyses will tell you the information you are after. I found it within a few minutes of searching. But instead of looking you make assumptions and jump to conclusions based on your own biases. How is that helpful to anyone? What are you adding to the conversation by promoting your own biases? Remember, the null hypothesis apriori false in nearly all research.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that? Experience in reading the peer-reviewed medical research literature since the 1970s. It used to be that one had to go to an actual biomedical library, as I have done on many occasions, and look up the articles through journal indexes and then walk to the shelf where the journals are kept. That still works, but now many of us also do online searches. Peter Norvig's article http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important). I see the Wikipedia article on piracetam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam still has some "citation needed" notes up by some factual claims, and some very old journals cited for some of the claims that do have citations. Because I had recently read http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534 http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534 about reviews of the actual effectiveness of one prescribed medicine that supposedly helps cognitive deficits, I was particularly interested in this thread to see what citations there are for recent, replicated research with proper protocol that back up the drugs most discussed in this thread. (I figured that anyone taking those drugs to good effect would readily remember the citations.) Over the decades, I've seen different kinds of smart drugs come and go out of vogue. Eventually, every use of smart drugs needs to ask, "What smart things are people who take this drug doing that aren't being done by people who don't take the drug?" People in the business of selling drugs have a lot of incentive to obscure the basic question of drug effectiveness in the interest of appealing to drug-buyers' hopes, which is why I request especially cogent evidence for claims such as those made about the drugs discussed in this thread.
    - corruption 17y ago
      "is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important)." Which science school did you go to? Science is about the body of evidence, not an individual study. It's about understanding mechanisms, gradually iterating between induction and retroduction to uncover new hypotheses then prove a mechanism over time. It's about gradually building up an argument over many years of research across the field, not any one individual study. I agree that we need to be careful in interpreting studies (I am a statistician, I should know), but your stance from ignorance adds nothing to the conversation, and in a worst case scenario belittles the efforts of an entire field that you no nothing about, but are biased against all the research you haven't even read from the outset.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

tokenadult 17y ago

There are 24,000 studies with the search term nootropic. To ask the question you suggested asking, which of those are well designed studies? (And to follow up with what is my concern, which of the better designed studies show an objectively measured improvement in cognitive function over a reasonably long span of observation?) Which studies, if any, make a positive case for meaningful effect with a good safety profile of nootropics in human patients? Citations would be greatly appreciated from any reader who has citations available. I will look them up. I checked the Cochrane Reviews yesterday while this thread was first active.

corruption 17y ago
Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that? My assumption when reading a study is that it is well designed. I trust in the scientific establishment vs random people on the internet, but are fine to be proven wrong when I read the methodolgy. Even a cursory look at the wikipedia page or some of the meta analyses will tell you the information you are after. I found it within a few minutes of searching. But instead of looking you make assumptions and jump to conclusions based on your own biases. How is that helpful to anyone? What are you adding to the conversation by promoting your own biases? Remember, the null hypothesis apriori false in nearly all research.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Your questions seem to err on the side of researchers not doing good research. Why is that? Experience in reading the peer-reviewed medical research literature since the 1970s. It used to be that one had to go to an actual biomedical library, as I have done on many occasions, and look up the articles through journal indexes and then walk to the shelf where the journals are kept. That still works, but now many of us also do online searches. Peter Norvig's article http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important). I see the Wikipedia article on piracetam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracetam still has some "citation needed" notes up by some factual claims, and some very old journals cited for some of the claims that do have citations. Because I had recently read http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534 http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3534 about reviews of the actual effectiveness of one prescribed medicine that supposedly helps cognitive deficits, I was particularly interested in this thread to see what citations there are for recent, replicated research with proper protocol that back up the drugs most discussed in this thread. (I figured that anyone taking those drugs to good effect would readily remember the citations.) Over the decades, I've seen different kinds of smart drugs come and go out of vogue. Eventually, every use of smart drugs needs to ask, "What smart things are people who take this drug doing that aren't being done by people who don't take the drug?" People in the business of selling drugs have a lot of incentive to obscure the basic question of drug effectiveness in the interest of appealing to drug-buyers' hopes, which is why I request especially cogent evidence for claims such as those made about the drugs discussed in this thread.
  - corruption 17y ago
    "is a good reminder that just getting into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't always establish that the published conclusion is correct (or important)." Which science school did you go to? Science is about the body of evidence, not an individual study. It's about understanding mechanisms, gradually iterating between induction and retroduction to uncover new hypotheses then prove a mechanism over time. It's about gradually building up an argument over many years of research across the field, not any one individual study. I agree that we need to be careful in interpreting studies (I am a statistician, I should know), but your stance from ignorance adds nothing to the conversation, and in a worst case scenario belittles the efforts of an entire field that you no nothing about, but are biased against all the research you haven't even read from the outset.