4 ms·

All of this seems to be anecdotal. Do you know of any research (as in, studies) which support any of this?

• gamblor956 13y ago
  Google returned this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19758171 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19758171 and a quasi-bibliography: http://www.celiac.com/articles/124/1/Multiple-Sclerosis-and-Celiac-Disease/Page1.html http://www.celiac.com/articles/124/1/Multiple-Sclerosis-and-...
• msandford 13y ago
  I love that anecdotes are considered worthless in medicine when in fact they're very clearly good places to start. Take an anecdote and do a small population study to try and find correlation. Then if there are any significant results, start looking for causation. In history nothing is legit except for primary sources. In medicine, it seems, primary sources -- no matter how compelling -- are worth a damn. Hilarious.
  • saraid216 13y ago
    > I love that anecdotes are considered worthless in medicine when in fact they're very clearly good places to start. They're a great place to start for a scientist with training in conducting medical research and the resources to carry it out. They're a terrible place to start for an internet forum reader who has neither.
  • bronson 13y ago
    No. Medicine is so broad and subjective that it's easy to find an anecdote implying almost anything. That's why expensive double blind is so important -- even doctors fool themselves. How many "carrots cured my cancer" wild goose chases would it take to bankrupt even the biggest company? Whatever that number is, it's smaller than the number of wild-ass medical anecdotes rolling around out there. Of course, everybody thinks that their own anecdote is compelling and obvious and all their friends on carb-free diets are idiots...
  • illuminate 13y ago
    Because isolated anecdotes aren't necessarily the same thing as "medicine".