9 ms·
You’d be surprised but that’s how a lot of medicine works. Your common paracetamol (Panadol) has a mechanism of action that is “not completely understood”. We’v
by temikus 7y ago
You’d be surprised but that’s how a lot of medicine works. Your common paracetamol (Panadol) has a mechanism of action that is “not completely understood”. We’ve come a long way in the past 100 years but certain areas are still pretty much trial and error.
- manjana 7y agoSame goes for our theory regarding depression for instance. We say the cause is a chemical imbalance, but this has never been measured; same goes for many mental conditions since it's next to impossible to measure the causal element given it's happening inside the brain.
- jdietrich 7y ago>We say the cause is a chemical imbalance "We" don't say that; pharmaceutical sales reps say it. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- grumdan 7y agoIn particular, this shows that it's not that it's not been measured. It's been measured and not found to be an incorrect explanation of what's happening.
- puranjay 7y agoSo much of medicine is like this. My in-laws are doctors and so many of their diagnoses eventually end up as "we have no idea what's happening, but these steroids should help. Why, we have no clue."
- nerdponx 7y agoAnd yet doctors reject all manner of so-called "alternative" therapies on the grounds that they have no plausible mechanism of action. A family member of mine had a somewhat-debilitating chronic condition in high school, which only got better with a combination of what today are garden-variety alternative therapies (acupuncture, elimination diet, et al). Today, as a doctor, pooh-poohs a lot of that stuff. It's confusing and disappointing to see.
- bradleyjg 7y agoDo a well designed study and it won’t be “so called ‘alternative’” anymore. We may not know why various real medical interventions work but we have better than “I’ve got a cousin” evidence that they do.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoI can't speak to this from personal experience, but I constantly hear the accusation that any sort of solid study on say herbals is going to cost millions of dollars, and that no big-pharma company would even bother to sponsor such a study because they can't patent the result (because it's an herb).
- bradleyjg 7y agoThere’s at least one pot based drug on the market. So I think there must be some way to profit from medicines that were known anecdotally to be medicinal in herb form.
- krageon 7y agoThey could patent a delivery mechanism, or isolate some compounds from the herb that work almost as well (that's not exactly an unusual result either). These arguments fall down because they don't make any sense.
- hnhg 7y agoAs a doctor, they may have a better understanding of placebos and statistics.
- garyrob 7y agoI get steroid shots through my eardrum for Meniere's disease. It seems to work. I don't think anyone knows why.
- puranjay 7y agoSo many neurological conditions are treated the same way. Like Bell's Palsy. We don't know what causes it, we don't know how to fix it, but steroids help a great deal