Folks, I'm surprised we still have this argument anywhere, usually on social media
"I saw on Twitter that Dr. XXX has had a 100% cure rate using lemon balm and Vitamin C" ... "Hydroxochloroquine and Azithromicin cure the disease but the Gates/Fauci/Big Pharma vaccinemongers want to inject us with their dangerous product" ... it goes on and on and on, and sometimes from people who *should* know better (or at least know the science well enough to know better)
Why Double Blind? - because if neither the patient nor the interventionist know what is being used, they cannot modify their behavior/course of action to alter the trajectory of the trial ... we have seen, over many decades, psychosomatic but measurable improvement from being given *salt/sugar pills* - we cannot know if the drug is having the effect unless a sizeable percentage of the test subjects are getting a placebo, so we can measure the outcome *in contrast* to the placebo ... also, frequently, the interventionist can have a financial interest in the success of the drug and so can alter the results to make them look better/worse than they are - there are too many of these cases to cite ... lastly, with appropriate clinical study design, you can weed out selection bias and cherry picking test subjects for the desired outcome (e.g. if I only select personal physical trainers as test subjects, my fat burning pill is going to look AWESOME ;-) Peer review is also critical ... these hucksters touting "cures" on social media, YouTube and Twitter are capitalizing on the public's naivete around study design, subject selection, end point determination and other critical objective factors that the FDA requires to prove 1. Safety, 2. Efficacy and 3. Clinically effective dosing ... if you read my earlier post on Hydroxychloroquine, we use it in the West to quell cytokine storms ... we actually know very little about its Mechanism of Action (MOA) , but have *recently* discovered that, among other things, it makes cell ion pumps less effective at removing Zinc ions, allowing the Zinc into the cytoplasm where the Zinc screws up protein synthesis ... good for combating infection in the short term - very very very bad long term ... and its low Therapeutic Index means that the Effective Dose (ED50) is pretty close to the Lethal Dose (LD50) ... treat any non peer-reviewed advice to about Hydroxychloroquine with extreme skepticism ... they just shut down a clinical trial in Brazil, due to excess death in the case population - meaning the people taking HC *died* at greater than expected rates when taking a clinically effective dose - you sure you want to mess with this drug? There are some interesting developments in other anti-virals, immune suppressants and therapeutic options being developed ... I'll post on those later https://elemental.medium.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-remdesivir-the-potential-coronavirus-drug-61f675d6c56e
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