6 ms·

Single data point, but my grandfather was treated for a systemic infection at Sentara Norfolk General by Dr. Marik using his Vitamin C protocol and it brought h

Single data point, but my grandfather was treated for a systemic infection at Sentara Norfolk General by Dr. Marik using his Vitamin C protocol and it brought him back from the brink of death when nothing else worked. Is the study fraudulent? Could be, and his fight to use Ivermectin on Covid patients always struck me as quackery as well. That said, it seems to me that there is something about the Vitamin C protocol that should not be dismissed.

civilized 5y ago
It's incredibly unlikely that the Marik Protocol is what made the difference. Following this fraudulent paper, the protocol was tested in 9 randomized controlled trials and they were all negative. And as a statistician I can tell you with absolute certainty this paper is fraudulent.
- bsdetector 5y ago
  As a non-statistician I can tell you this blog is absolutely unconvincing, because it doesn't explain anything about what the test is. Apparently this test is how likely it is for the same number of people to have the primary diagnosis in each group because all the 1.0 have equal number of patients with that diagnosis or off by 1. Like if they said, we have 8 people with COPD in the first group and then waited for COPD patients to show up at the ER for the second group until they had 8 then you would get a perfect 1.0 match since they made that variable the same? And then the other variables would be randomish, but maybe correlated so more than 0.5? Maybe you can explain how this layman take is wrong, but if all that's going on is they selected patients with the same diagnoses and didn't make that clear in the paper then I don't understand what the big deal is.
  - jmount 5y ago
    I'll give it a try. The study is two small populations that are assumed to be similar. If this were the case, then knowing the study ID (1 or 2) would sometimes wrongly look predictive for different conditions. However none of the measurements have this flaw, and that it self is very very unlikely. The claim is the data looks like it was designed to not have any imbalance from between sets 1 and 2, to an extend that is itself unlikely due to sampling.
    - bsdetector 5y ago
      The entire second group was picked after the first one, and there were imbalances on almost half of the diagnoses. So if I understand this right, the problem is not the 1.0s since if they were selecting the same number of patients with the same primary diagnoses for the second group then those would be expected, but that there should be some 0.2s in there as well.
      - cvinn 5y ago
        For one thing, no matching was done (as the email explains).
        bsdetector 5y ago
        "if they said, we have 8 people with COPD in the first group and then waited for COPD patients to show up at the ER for the second group until they had 8" Did you not read this? I asked whether if they did this they would come up with the perfect 1 scores on those items. Whether they actually did or not is a separate matter. What troubles me more than whether this study was faked or not is the certainty HN readers have that it was without being able to answer simple questions about why they believe that. Is this test just measuring the likelihood of each group having the same primary diagnosis? If they added people to the second group so they had the same number of a primary diagnosis, would that result in a 1.0 p value on this test? These should not be difficult questions to answer for somebody certain that fraud occurred.
        civilized 5y ago
        1. The procedure you describe would make patient recruitment non-consecutive, contrary to the reported procedure. Consecutive means you don't skip anyone who has the condition you're trying to treat. You would have to skip people if you're selecting matched treatment and control groups. In this case, people with sepsis who don't fit your matching design have to be skipped and excluded from the study. 2. Patient subgroup counts matched perfectly not only on COPD, but on about a dozen other conditions. Difficulty of matching subgroup counts grows rapidly with number of dimensions. To match subgroup counts for Group A and Group B near-perfectly on a dozen different dimensions, there's no substantially easier method than just one-to-one perfect matching, which requires a very, very large number of patients. You have to take Patient A1, who has subset X1 of 12 different conditions, and find Patient B1 with that exact same subset. Then repeat, 47 times in this case. It is already quite hard to find the person B1 who has the exact subset X1 of conditions that person A1 had. For example, if there are 12 conditions, each condition is present in half the people that come into your clinic, and the conditions are independent, you'll need to go through 2^12 = 4096 people, on average, to find another exact match. The conditions may be a bit correlated but this can only help you so much when you're talking about 12 different conditions. To repeat that feat 47 times is very hard. You'd have to churn through 10s or 100s of thousands of sepsis patients to get your matching subset. This would require access to an enormous pool of sepsis patients and constant reporting of all the conditions they have, that you want to match on. For this to be done without any mention in the paper is utterly beyond belief. And the fact that the counts match near-perfectly in an off-by-1 fashion does not help the situation at all.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Am too a non-statistician. If I understand correctly: The two groups have very strong statistical relations across multiple variables (not just COPD), yet the study clearly states they were chosen almost randomly. This is extremly unlikely to happen in a perfectly randomized test. What you describe is selecting the group in advance so they match (though you use only one variable). There are cases where doing this selection is reasonable and is useful. However, the study describes a different selection process. If the selection process described was not the one actually used, what else in the study does not match reality?
Maursault 5y ago
Vitamin C, I think studies finally proved about 10 years ago, puts the immune system into overdrive. So perhaps Vitamin C kicked up his immune system, and his own immune system is what beat the infection and put him on the mend.
- ck2 5y ago
  Vitamin C is simply an electron donor for other chemical reactions. That can be very very important if not critical. However more is not better. Endurance athletes know that taking more than say 200mg (twice the RDA) of C per day will defeat training adaptations because it calms the stress response too much. However people get more than a bit overboard and woo-woo about Vitamin C. Linus Pauling was a chemist and was obsessed with it but at least he was scientific about his quest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... and it gave us the Linus Pauling Institute which is a great thing for factual nutrition, I use it often as a reference: https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C
  - Maursault 5y ago
    - ck2 5y ago
      ps. meta analysis of 60 years of Vitamin C studies with placebo controls showed the opposite of what you are remembering, C did not prevent or reduce the common cold symptoms/severity - and the electron donor principle can be googled or it's right on that LPI link above. But ha I have the same size complaint. I have to sit there with a safety blade and cut 500mg tablets into four and then of course it's so imprecise. They market what sells. People don't want to buy 100mg if 500mg is next to it for the same price. Everyone think more is better, super-size it. BTW you can buy high quality Vitamin C gummies (ie. Vitafusion Power C) which because of their limited capacity per gummy are around only 100mg and the bottle says to take 4-6 but of course you can just take one. Studies show gummies have the same absorption quality of pills, downside is only the added sugar, which is tiny.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> Single data point, but my grandfather was treated for a systemic infection at Sentara Norfolk General by Dr. Marik using his Vitamin C protocol and it brought him back from the brink of death when nothing else worked. And this is exactly why scientists rightfully ignore "single data points" such as this. People get sick and recover all the time. And sometimes people get very, very, very sick, and they still recover on their own. So there would be a non-trivial percentage of people who would have gotten very sick, and just based on timing it wouldn't be unusual that they would be given some treatment and then credit that treatment when they recovered. Not only is this study blatant fraud, nine other studies tried to replicate the results and showed no benefit to sepsis outcomes.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
  Not to mention, a mild vitamin C deficiency will screw with the immune system. In such cases, I can imagine vitamin C treatments having a clear and measurable effect. The same applies for quite a wide range of other nutrients as well.
  - catgary 5y ago
    Yeah, wasn’t there a good meta-analysis of the “Ivermectin treats Covid” papers that basics said “Ivermectin seems to treats Covid in countries where certain parasites are endemic, and if doesn’t where they don’t”.
    - upsidesinclude 5y ago
      That's from an Alexander post (slate star codex fame), but there is good argument for effect beyond parasitic reduction... The politics and money involved have insured we will not come to the truth of the matter
whazor 5y ago
For farm animals, acids are used to reduce the pH value of drinking water and to increase health. If you consume vitamin C via citrus fruits like oranges, then you are making a more hostile environment for bacterial infections.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > For farm animals, acids are used to reduce the pH value of drinking water and to increase health. I have never heard of this practice, and can find no evidence of it online. Can you provide a citation? > If you consume vitamin C via citrus fruits like oranges, then you are making a more hostile environment for bacterial infections. This is utter nonsense. The pH of a living organism is tightly regulated, and a failure of this regulation can be rapidly fatal. Consuming small (sub-gram) quantities of vitamin C does not have any meaningful effect on blood or extracellular pH.
  - YesThatTom2 5y ago
    > This is utter nonsense. The pH of a living organism is tightly regulated, and a failure of this regulation can be rapidly fatal. Consuming small (sub-gram) quantities of vitamin C does not have any meaningful effect on blood or extracellular pH. Translated for laypeople: This is BS. The pH of your body is constant and your body has mechanisms to make sure it stays constant. If your pH changed as claimed, you’d die.
    - upsidesinclude 5y ago
      The mechanisms that maintain a stable pH are driving outcomes. Your statement is accurate, just doesn't acknowledge the changes required for homeostasis. There is considerable effect merely in osmotic pressure relative to cellular function. To dismiss that carries as much error
DanielVZ 5y ago
Sample size of 1 here too. My dad started drinking MMS (Miracle Mineral Solution) , which is a solution you dilute in water to create a compound that cleans the body or something. He started feeling better, no more headaches, better humour, started loosing weight, was sleeping great, etc. Turns out my brother replaced it with water the next day he bought it. Placebo was the real miracle here.
- FreeFull 5y ago
  Your brother definitely did the right thing, given that "MMS" is actually chlorine dioxide, which is an industrial bleach. Drinking it can seriously damage the digestive system.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Holy shit, you weren't kidding. I use CloSYS (dilute chlorine dioxide) for mouthwash but would never drink the stuff.
rmbyrro 5y ago
Datapoint is part of a dataset. Otherwise it's just an anecdote. If you trust anecdotes, your conclusions will be wrong most often than right. You might be lucky here and there, but will lose in the longrun. Science is about being right most of the time and winning in the long-run.

civilized 5y ago

It's incredibly unlikely that the Marik Protocol is what made the difference. Following this fraudulent paper, the protocol was tested in 9 randomized controlled trials and they were all negative. And as a statistician I can tell you with absolute certainty this paper is fraudulent.

bsdetector 5y ago
As a non-statistician I can tell you this blog is absolutely unconvincing, because it doesn't explain anything about what the test is. Apparently this test is how likely it is for the same number of people to have the primary diagnosis in each group because all the 1.0 have equal number of patients with that diagnosis or off by 1. Like if they said, we have 8 people with COPD in the first group and then waited for COPD patients to show up at the ER for the second group until they had 8 then you would get a perfect 1.0 match since they made that variable the same? And then the other variables would be randomish, but maybe correlated so more than 0.5? Maybe you can explain how this layman take is wrong, but if all that's going on is they selected patients with the same diagnoses and didn't make that clear in the paper then I don't understand what the big deal is.
- jmount 5y ago
  I'll give it a try. The study is two small populations that are assumed to be similar. If this were the case, then knowing the study ID (1 or 2) would sometimes wrongly look predictive for different conditions. However none of the measurements have this flaw, and that it self is very very unlikely. The claim is the data looks like it was designed to not have any imbalance from between sets 1 and 2, to an extend that is itself unlikely due to sampling.
  - bsdetector 5y ago
    The entire second group was picked after the first one, and there were imbalances on almost half of the diagnoses. So if I understand this right, the problem is not the 1.0s since if they were selecting the same number of patients with the same primary diagnoses for the second group then those would be expected, but that there should be some 0.2s in there as well.
    - cvinn 5y ago
      For one thing, no matching was done (as the email explains).
      - bsdetector 5y ago
        "if they said, we have 8 people with COPD in the first group and then waited for COPD patients to show up at the ER for the second group until they had 8" Did you not read this? I asked whether if they did this they would come up with the perfect 1 scores on those items. Whether they actually did or not is a separate matter. What troubles me more than whether this study was faked or not is the certainty HN readers have that it was without being able to answer simple questions about why they believe that. Is this test just measuring the likelihood of each group having the same primary diagnosis? If they added people to the second group so they had the same number of a primary diagnosis, would that result in a 1.0 p value on this test? These should not be difficult questions to answer for somebody certain that fraud occurred.
        civilized 5y ago
        1. The procedure you describe would make patient recruitment non-consecutive, contrary to the reported procedure. Consecutive means you don't skip anyone who has the condition you're trying to treat. You would have to skip people if you're selecting matched treatment and control groups. In this case, people with sepsis who don't fit your matching design have to be skipped and excluded from the study. 2. Patient subgroup counts matched perfectly not only on COPD, but on about a dozen other conditions. Difficulty of matching subgroup counts grows rapidly with number of dimensions. To match subgroup counts for Group A and Group B near-perfectly on a dozen different dimensions, there's no substantially easier method than just one-to-one perfect matching, which requires a very, very large number of patients. You have to take Patient A1, who has subset X1 of 12 different conditions, and find Patient B1 with that exact same subset. Then repeat, 47 times in this case. It is already quite hard to find the person B1 who has the exact subset X1 of conditions that person A1 had. For example, if there are 12 conditions, each condition is present in half the people that come into your clinic, and the conditions are independent, you'll need to go through 2^12 = 4096 people, on average, to find another exact match. The conditions may be a bit correlated but this can only help you so much when you're talking about 12 different conditions. To repeat that feat 47 times is very hard. You'd have to churn through 10s or 100s of thousands of sepsis patients to get your matching subset. This would require access to an enormous pool of sepsis patients and constant reporting of all the conditions they have, that you want to match on. For this to be done without any mention in the paper is utterly beyond belief. And the fact that the counts match near-perfectly in an off-by-1 fashion does not help the situation at all.
- yyyk 5y ago
  Am too a non-statistician. If I understand correctly: The two groups have very strong statistical relations across multiple variables (not just COPD), yet the study clearly states they were chosen almost randomly. This is extremly unlikely to happen in a perfectly randomized test. What you describe is selecting the group in advance so they match (though you use only one variable). There are cases where doing this selection is reasonable and is useful. However, the study describes a different selection process. If the selection process described was not the one actually used, what else in the study does not match reality?

Maursault 5y ago

Vitamin C, I think studies finally proved about 10 years ago, puts the immune system into overdrive. So perhaps Vitamin C kicked up his immune system, and his own immune system is what beat the infection and put him on the mend.

ck2 5y ago
Vitamin C is simply an electron donor for other chemical reactions. That can be very very important if not critical. However more is not better. Endurance athletes know that taking more than say 200mg (twice the RDA) of C per day will defeat training adaptations because it calms the stress response too much. However people get more than a bit overboard and woo-woo about Vitamin C. Linus Pauling was a chemist and was obsessed with it but at least he was scientific about his quest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research_and_vitamin_C_advocacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... and it gave us the Linus Pauling Institute which is a great thing for factual nutrition, I use it often as a reference: https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C https://lpi.oregonstate.edu/mic/vitamins/vitamin-C
- Maursault 5y ago
  - ck2 5y ago
    ps. meta analysis of 60 years of Vitamin C studies with placebo controls showed the opposite of what you are remembering, C did not prevent or reduce the common cold symptoms/severity - and the electron donor principle can be googled or it's right on that LPI link above. But ha I have the same size complaint. I have to sit there with a safety blade and cut 500mg tablets into four and then of course it's so imprecise. They market what sells. People don't want to buy 100mg if 500mg is next to it for the same price. Everyone think more is better, super-size it. BTW you can buy high quality Vitamin C gummies (ie. Vitafusion Power C) which because of their limited capacity per gummy are around only 100mg and the bottle says to take 4-6 but of course you can just take one. Studies show gummies have the same absorption quality of pills, downside is only the added sugar, which is tiny.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> Single data point, but my grandfather was treated for a systemic infection at Sentara Norfolk General by Dr. Marik using his Vitamin C protocol and it brought him back from the brink of death when nothing else worked. And this is exactly why scientists rightfully ignore "single data points" such as this. People get sick and recover all the time. And sometimes people get very, very, very sick, and they still recover on their own. So there would be a non-trivial percentage of people who would have gotten very sick, and just based on timing it wouldn't be unusual that they would be given some treatment and then credit that treatment when they recovered. Not only is this study blatant fraud, nine other studies tried to replicate the results and showed no benefit to sepsis outcomes.

2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
Not to mention, a mild vitamin C deficiency will screw with the immune system. In such cases, I can imagine vitamin C treatments having a clear and measurable effect. The same applies for quite a wide range of other nutrients as well.
- catgary 5y ago
  Yeah, wasn’t there a good meta-analysis of the “Ivermectin treats Covid” papers that basics said “Ivermectin seems to treats Covid in countries where certain parasites are endemic, and if doesn’t where they don’t”.
  - upsidesinclude 5y ago
    That's from an Alexander post (slate star codex fame), but there is good argument for effect beyond parasitic reduction... The politics and money involved have insured we will not come to the truth of the matter

whazor 5y ago

For farm animals, acids are used to reduce the pH value of drinking water and to increase health. If you consume vitamin C via citrus fruits like oranges, then you are making a more hostile environment for bacterial infections.

duskwuff 5y ago
> For farm animals, acids are used to reduce the pH value of drinking water and to increase health. I have never heard of this practice, and can find no evidence of it online. Can you provide a citation? > If you consume vitamin C via citrus fruits like oranges, then you are making a more hostile environment for bacterial infections. This is utter nonsense. The pH of a living organism is tightly regulated, and a failure of this regulation can be rapidly fatal. Consuming small (sub-gram) quantities of vitamin C does not have any meaningful effect on blood or extracellular pH.
- YesThatTom2 5y ago
  > This is utter nonsense. The pH of a living organism is tightly regulated, and a failure of this regulation can be rapidly fatal. Consuming small (sub-gram) quantities of vitamin C does not have any meaningful effect on blood or extracellular pH. Translated for laypeople: This is BS. The pH of your body is constant and your body has mechanisms to make sure it stays constant. If your pH changed as claimed, you’d die.
  - upsidesinclude 5y ago
    The mechanisms that maintain a stable pH are driving outcomes. Your statement is accurate, just doesn't acknowledge the changes required for homeostasis. There is considerable effect merely in osmotic pressure relative to cellular function. To dismiss that carries as much error

DanielVZ 5y ago

Sample size of 1 here too. My dad started drinking MMS (Miracle Mineral Solution) , which is a solution you dilute in water to create a compound that cleans the body or something. He started feeling better, no more headaches, better humour, started loosing weight, was sleeping great, etc. Turns out my brother replaced it with water the next day he bought it. Placebo was the real miracle here.

FreeFull 5y ago
Your brother definitely did the right thing, given that "MMS" is actually chlorine dioxide, which is an industrial bleach. Drinking it can seriously damage the digestive system.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Holy shit, you weren't kidding. I use CloSYS (dilute chlorine dioxide) for mouthwash but would never drink the stuff.

rmbyrro 5y ago

Datapoint is part of a dataset. Otherwise it's just an anecdote. If you trust anecdotes, your conclusions will be wrong most often than right. You might be lucky here and there, but will lose in the longrun. Science is about being right most of the time and winning in the long-run.