Moderators: bisme37, Parliament10, canman1971, shackles10, snowman, Froob, Darthlukey, Shak_Celts
exculpatory wrote:Regarding HQ:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1998?_ga=2.91355544.365124750.1589882121-1388512184.1589882118&
He is such a dangerously stupid mother **** moron.
claycarver wrote:exculpatory wrote:Regarding HQ:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1998?_ga=2.91355544.365124750.1589882121-1388512184.1589882118&
He is such a dangerously stupid mother **** moron.
I think he's an idiot for taking something with no known benefits, but this is the first I've heard about hydroxychloroquine being dangerous. Everyone going to the Congo takes it to prevent malaria, and I was under the impression it was safe.
exculpatory wrote:Slax wrote:My wife (who has a background in public health and epidemiology research) told me something like, "Assume that every piece of research into possible treatments for COVID is overhyped and not very useful for you to know about." Her opinion is:
1. There are a lot of co-morbidity correlations we're seeing that basically come down to "people with any one health problem often have other health problems, and for reasons we are still working on figuring out are also more vulnerable to COVID-19", so if you try to link any health problem like a vitamin deficiency to COVID-19 severity you are likely to find something, but it doesn't show much about whether treating those underlying health problems actually affect COVID-19 severity. As an example, she pointed out that low vitamin D is associated with other health conditions like metabolic syndrome, which is considered an enormous risk factor for COVID-19.
2. The quality of research right now is REALLY limited in value or even shoddy, in part because research is very new so we don't know what to look for, in part because there's a lot of pressure to publish quickly if you have something novel that might be interesting or useful, and in part because the standards of publishing have been relaxed to encourage rapid sharing. She says a lot of the studies she's seeing right now are just comparisons between a small population of sick people and a small population of not-as-sick people, with a statistical test to prove that the populations are different in some trait, and that these types of studies aren't really well-designed to demonstrate why one population is different from the other (in her words, "everyone with a low p-value thinks they have something useful to say"). She compared this to work she used to do on large, years-long cohort studies using experimental designs to ensure high-quality data collection in an attempt to demonstrate lifestyle risk factors for diseases, and how even then it was really difficult to make judgments about what is causal and what is correlated. She says that it's going to be a long time before research on COVID-19 meets a high quality threshold.
c) The media is hyping up treatments because journalists don't really understand how to interpret recently published research as well as most researchers and physicians. She says there are things you can be optimistic about, but also that there are a lot of news articles being written right now about the "latest research" without the level of skepticism that they deserve. She also says to be super skeptical of any reporting about miracle cures like "just take more vitamin D" - that if it's true that vitamin D supplements help reduce the severity of COVID-19, it will almost certainly be a small effect where you get some small reduction in average severity. She says that the level of research we're getting right now is not really at the point where you could reliably measure that sort of effect, but maybe we will know more in the future.
She did say feel free to take vitamins if you want, and that maybe vitamin D and/or zinc might have some modest protective effects in some people, but she's really worn out by the overly exuberant reporting of tentative research as if it's miracle cures I think.
She also quoted her endocrinologist friend, "Unless you have a known vitamin deficiency, vitamins usually just give you more expensive pee."
Very thoughtful & pretty much accurate. My compliments to your wife’s wisdom so early in her career.
Association & correlation do NOT = causation.
The uninformed press overhypes everything - especially during a **** pandemic, & the uninformed lay public sucks it up like Halloween candy corn.
And some utter morons in authority with the insight & IQ of dry wall promulgate Lysol & unproven/disproven treatments (which will likely predispose a subset of people at risk to potentially lethal cardiac dysrhythmias).
Now you can quote your endocrinologist friend from RealGM:
Although still somewhat controversial, I like a serum 25 OH D level of roughly 30-40 ng/mL with regard to optimal bine health (mitigation of osteomalacia & osteopenia). The other reported associations of Vitamin D insufficiency & deficiency (EG, the metabolic syndrome [which only afflicts tens & tens & tens of millions of people in the USA - LOL, T2DM, immune modulation]) still require a **** mega-bucket load of rigorously designed prospective trials to establish causality.
PS Your postings are much more dense than my Truth posts from back in the day. LOL.
(prescribed by my own endocrinologist)Slax wrote:exculpatory wrote:Slax wrote:My wife (who has a background in public health and epidemiology research) told me something like, "Assume that every piece of research into possible treatments for COVID is overhyped and not very useful for you to know about." Her opinion is:
1. There are a lot of co-morbidity correlations we're seeing that basically come down to "people with any one health problem often have other health problems, and for reasons we are still working on figuring out are also more vulnerable to COVID-19", so if you try to link any health problem like a vitamin deficiency to COVID-19 severity you are likely to find something, but it doesn't show much about whether treating those underlying health problems actually affect COVID-19 severity. As an example, she pointed out that low vitamin D is associated with other health conditions like metabolic syndrome, which is considered an enormous risk factor for COVID-19.
2. The quality of research right now is REALLY limited in value or even shoddy, in part because research is very new so we don't know what to look for, in part because there's a lot of pressure to publish quickly if you have something novel that might be interesting or useful, and in part because the standards of publishing have been relaxed to encourage rapid sharing. She says a lot of the studies she's seeing right now are just comparisons between a small population of sick people and a small population of not-as-sick people, with a statistical test to prove that the populations are different in some trait, and that these types of studies aren't really well-designed to demonstrate why one population is different from the other (in her words, "everyone with a low p-value thinks they have something useful to say"). She compared this to work she used to do on large, years-long cohort studies using experimental designs to ensure high-quality data collection in an attempt to demonstrate lifestyle risk factors for diseases, and how even then it was really difficult to make judgments about what is causal and what is correlated. She says that it's going to be a long time before research on COVID-19 meets a high quality threshold.
c) The media is hyping up treatments because journalists don't really understand how to interpret recently published research as well as most researchers and physicians. She says there are things you can be optimistic about, but also that there are a lot of news articles being written right now about the "latest research" without the level of skepticism that they deserve. She also says to be super skeptical of any reporting about miracle cures like "just take more vitamin D" - that if it's true that vitamin D supplements help reduce the severity of COVID-19, it will almost certainly be a small effect where you get some small reduction in average severity. She says that the level of research we're getting right now is not really at the point where you could reliably measure that sort of effect, but maybe we will know more in the future.
She did say feel free to take vitamins if you want, and that maybe vitamin D and/or zinc might have some modest protective effects in some people, but she's really worn out by the overly exuberant reporting of tentative research as if it's miracle cures I think.
She also quoted her endocrinologist friend, "Unless you have a known vitamin deficiency, vitamins usually just give you more expensive pee."
Very thoughtful & pretty much accurate. My compliments to your wife’s wisdom so early in her career.
Association & correlation do NOT = causation.
The uninformed press overhypes everything - especially during a **** pandemic, & the uninformed lay public sucks it up like Halloween candy corn.
And some utter morons in authority with the insight & IQ of dry wall promulgate Lysol & unproven/disproven treatments (which will likely predispose a subset of people at risk to potentially lethal cardiac dysrhythmias).
Now you can quote your endocrinologist friend from RealGM:
Although still somewhat controversial, I like a serum 25 OH D level of roughly 30-40 ng/mL with regard to optimal bine health (mitigation of osteomalacia & osteopenia). The other reported associations of Vitamin D insufficiency & deficiency (EG, the metabolic syndrome [which only afflicts tens & tens & tens of millions of people in the USA - LOL, T2DM, immune modulation]) still require a **** mega-bucket load of rigorously designed prospective trials to establish causality.
PS Your postings are much more dense than my Truth posts from back in the day. LOL.
Coincidentally, I actually do take Vitamin D for low bone density
exculpatory wrote:Slax wrote:exculpatory wrote:
Very thoughtful & pretty much accurate. My compliments to your wife’s wisdom so early in her career.
Association & correlation do NOT = causation.
The uninformed press overhypes everything - especially during a **** pandemic, & the uninformed lay public sucks it up like Halloween candy corn.
And some utter morons in authority with the insight & IQ of dry wall promulgate Lysol & unproven/disproven treatments (which will likely predispose a subset of people at risk to potentially lethal cardiac dysrhythmias).
Now you can quote your endocrinologist friend from RealGM:
Although still somewhat controversial, I like a serum 25 OH D level of roughly 30-40 ng/mL with regard to optimal bine health (mitigation of osteomalacia & osteopenia). The other reported associations of Vitamin D insufficiency & deficiency (EG, the metabolic syndrome [which only afflicts tens & tens & tens of millions of people in the USA - LOL, T2DM, immune modulation]) still require a **** mega-bucket load of rigorously designed prospective trials to establish causality.
PS Your postings are much more dense than my Truth posts from back in the day. LOL.
Coincidentally, I actually do take Vitamin D for low bone density
A young man with a reasonably well balanced diet & reasonable sun light exposure typically should NOT be D deficient to the point that it results in osteopenia/osteomalacia.
I hope your endocrinologist has clearly & definitively ruled out all of the organic etiologies of D deficiency (in particular, malabsorption/celiac disease) - as well as the non-vitamin D deficient etiologies of osteopenia/osteomalacia (including the various etiologies of hypophosphatemia).
exculpatory wrote:Spoiler:
, but I'll show my wife and pass the reference to my endocrinologist! The good news is that it sounds like she's already following the recommended standard care treatment (vitamin D and calcium supplement + regular 24-h urine tests). 
threrf23 wrote:Slax wrote:
1. There are a lot of co-morbidity correlations we're seeing that basically come down to "people with any one health problem often have other health problems, and for reasons we are still working on figuring out are also more vulnerable to COVID-19", so if you try to link any health problem like a vitamin deficiency to COVID-19 severity you are likely to find something, but it doesn't show much about whether treating those underlying health problems actually affect COVID-19 severity. As an example, she pointed out that low vitamin D is associated with other health conditions like metabolic syndrome, which is considered an enormous risk factor for COVID-19.
It is also IMO worth noting that there is a debate regarding the merits of synthetic Vitamin D versus naturally derived Vitamin D (i.e. from sunlight or food).
The hospital administration originally claimed the woman in her 20s had been wearing “lingerie” — but later clarified the two-piece ensemble was possibly a “swimming suit.”
The overheated health care worker has yet to make a public statement on the incident. However, readers of the Tula Pressa had plenty to say.
“At least someone has a sense of humor in this gloomy, gloomy reality,” said Sergey Ratnikov.
Marina Astakhova added, “Well done, she raised the mood of the patients.”
And Valery Kapnin asked, “Why punish the nurse? You need to reward her. Seeing this outfit, no one wants to die.”
ConstableGeneva wrote:The hospital administration originally claimed the woman in her 20s had been wearing “lingerie” — but later clarified the two-piece ensemble was possibly a “swimming suit.”
The overheated health care worker has yet to make a public statement on the incident. However, readers of the Tula Pressa had plenty to say.
“At least someone has a sense of humor in this gloomy, gloomy reality,” said Sergey Ratnikov.
Marina Astakhova added, “Well done, she raised the mood of the patients.”
And Valery Kapnin asked, “Why punish the nurse? You need to reward her. Seeing this outfit, no one wants to die.”
ConstableGeneva wrote:The hospital administration originally claimed the woman in her 20s had been wearing “lingerie” — but later clarified the two-piece ensemble was possibly a “swimming suit.”
The overheated health care worker has yet to make a public statement on the incident. However, readers of the Tula Pressa had plenty to say.
“At least someone has a sense of humor in this gloomy, gloomy reality,” said Sergey Ratnikov.
Marina Astakhova added, “Well done, she raised the mood of the patients.”
And Valery Kapnin asked, “Why punish the nurse? You need to reward her. Seeing this outfit, no one wants to die.”
Fencer reregistered wrote:I've been having a lot of flu-like symptoms as, to a lesser extent, has my wife. Now, we've been extreme isolaters; neither of us has been inside a building other than our house or close to a human being other than each other since March. So it didn't seem likely that we had the disease. Even so, we finally powered up the oximeter she'd bought, and were glad to see that each of us got readings in the 98-99% range.
DoubleHappiness wrote:I haven't been posting much during this time. Just want to say hope everyone is coping okay. Also feel better Fencer.
Edit: Looks like my last post was pretty much exactly this a month ago lol. Not trying to spam or anything. Just don't have much for basketball thoughts these days.
I think you're good!ConstableGeneva wrote:The hospital administration originally claimed the woman in her 20s had been wearing “lingerie” — but later clarified the two-piece ensemble was possibly a “swimming suit.”
The overheated health care worker has yet to make a public statement on the incident. However, readers of the Tula Pressa had plenty to say.
“At least someone has a sense of humor in this gloomy, gloomy reality,” said Sergey Ratnikov.
Marina Astakhova added, “Well done, she raised the mood of the patients.”
And Valery Kapnin asked, “Why punish the nurse? You need to reward her. Seeing this outfit, no one wants to die.”
Kemba For Three wrote:Fencer reregistered wrote:I've been having a lot of flu-like symptoms as, to a lesser extent, has my wife. Now, we've been extreme isolaters; neither of us has been inside a building other than our house or close to a human being other than each other since March. So it didn't seem likely that we had the disease. Even so, we finally powered up the oximeter she'd bought, and were glad to see that each of us got readings in the 98-99% range.
Hope you two are feeling okay Fencer. Keep checking the oxygen and temp at times.
You guys don't go out I believe much if you do.
Sometimes I notice we can feel icky with the change of seasons, especially where we live. It tries to get warm.....then gets cold again, then sorta warm, but then colder again, then rain and then your body feels like exploding until the weather makes up it's damn mind with some stability.
claycarver wrote:I'm a visual person so this chart was better than a million words for me. They've estimated the 2020 total corona deaths at 150,000, broke those estimates down by age based on current trends, then showed how those deaths compare to 2016 causes of death.
Explanations and other interesting stuff on the page:
https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-or-pneumonia-by-age-630aea3ae5a9