On Monday, 23 December 2019 23:27:09 UTC, Roger Hayter wrote:
wrote:

On Monday, 23 December 2019 13:20:10 UTC, Roger Hayter wrote:

Anyone with the cash to hire competent people and administer the trial
can run one. As you say, there is no reason a drug company should
spend its shareholders' money on such things, and a university
department would need some reason to suppose there was a benefit.
Contrary anecdata is that chilli pepper (especially Scotch Bonnet) is
very good for stomach problems, respiratory viruses and illness in
general and this is also a solanaceous plant. So I don't believe a word
of it. There is no obvious reason why doctors should tell patients any
old wives' tale that they may have come across, prove it if you want us
to believe it.

Medical studies with enough participants to be useful are expensive.
You'll only get the funds if someone stands to benefit financially from
it. That only happens when the study conclusion promotes their patented
product. Hence studies mostly don't get done for unpatentable drugs &
processes.


NT

It's true about bringing a drug to market. But if you are testing a
physical intervention which is a normal activity or an effect of diet
involving normal food you don't need toxicity and safety trials.
Neither do you have to complete prescribed safety and efficacy studies.
So if there is convincing anecdotal evidence a charity or a university
department may fund a study on relatively small numbers to see if a
positive effect can be identified. For diet, observational studies,
with all their disadvantages of proper control and confounding, may be
preferred to interventions as, unfortunately, few people will stick to a
dietary restriction or addition for more than a few days even if they
promise to.


In the area of medicine in which I am most involved, some of the absolute basics have never been properly assessed.

In the 1950s synthetic medicines became available and, over the next twenty or so years, the former animal-based medicines were effectively phased out.. Yet there is not one single research paper which showed this to be safe, effective or desirable. (Except on grounds of cost.)

Even now, there is next to no direct comparison and the very few bits of research seem to show some benefit to the animal-based medicine but are dismissed as only the patients' opinion - nothing really measurable.