Like it or not, who paid for the study, and who stands to benefit are just as important as the study results. I've even seen study results where the data itself shows the opposite of the conclusions of the study. Thank you for reading this far, now come to my secret volcano lair and give me all your money.
The Washington Post noted the efforts behind the revival of ayurveda as a part of the ruling party's rhetoric of restoring India's past glory to achieve prosperity in the future.[4]
nationalists and pseudoscience, name a more iconic duo
The placebo effect doesn’t help. It’s just noise in the data collection process. It’s particularly problematic with human trials that rely on subjective evidence. Humans have a bias that actions have effects, even when they don’t (gamblers blowing on dice, wishing on a star etc).
Any intervention will have people think that the outcome has changed because of the intervention. This doesn’t mean the placebo effect helped, it just altered the recorded outcome. If it was a device was used to make the measurement, rather than human opinion, we just call it noise/error.
It’s a common misconception that the placebo effect does something. It does nothing other than artificially increase subjective measurements. Placebo effect is stronger in very subjective medical conditions such as pain, shiny packaging and brand names are reported to provide greater pain relief. Such medicines are so tightly regulated the formulation and supply leaves very little opportunity for medicines to actually have an effect. You don’t see the same effect when it comes to reducing the size of cancer tumours or altering directly measurable quantities.
Doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe placebos in the UK. Because it’s dangerous and a source of corruption. Such as King Charles selling homeopathic services to the NHS. Doctors do recommend such services, they do this primarily to dismiss patients and their issues.
A spice used in Indian cuisine. It's intensely yellow due to curcumin, a compound that has miraculous property of causing false positives in about any cell assay (ie it seems like it does something, but really it decomposes/is fluorescent/damages cell wall/clumps up/pulls metal ions where they shouldn't be/forms hydrogen peroxide where it shouldn't be, all of which can look like some kind of activity when looking at cells, but it is not so)
Also it's completely insoluble in water and shredded by liver in minutes, so it's physically impossible for it to be active in vivo (can't do shit if it's not there). It's great for churning out bad science tho
It is used in ayurveda, and some proponents of ayurveda want to prove that it cures literally everything, and its behaviour in cell assays makes it seem so at least as long as you don't look too closely
I'd say it's worse than placebo, because it's known by now that nothing of that shit has any chance to work yet there are still clinical trials with it. This takes away resources from things that have a better shot at working which imo makes it pretty unethical
I'd greatly appreciate a miraculous panacea for my rheumatoid arthritis, especially one available at turmeric's price point. I've gone through a gamut of biologics that my immune system builds resistance against. Rinvoq's doing pretty good at taking the edge off currently, but I still flare up if triggered. It's also running a $6,000 wholesale a month... thank [deity] for insurance and copay assistance.
Delicious food is great, but alleviating my pain and fatigue during an RA flare? Manna from heaven.
Kurkuma/curcuma is the name of this plant in latin, french, german, spanish, slavic languages, arabic and few others, it's the english who named it weird (it's zerdeçal in turkish, similar in some turkic languages and haldi or similar in some languages of india)
Reminds me of this website happily reporting that you should eat curcuma because curcumin was shown (?) to be a possible cellular anti-proliferating... 🤦
Edit: I have no skin in this game. I don't take turmeric and won't ever because of the risk of lead. I'm just pointing out that the meme is inaccurate. The person who replied to me pointed out some flaws in the first study (not the second), but none of the flaws mentioned makes the meme accurate. Even the shitty first study I linked found a significant condition difference in its primary endpoint at 8 weeks. Yeah, it's got flaws (which the second doesn't), but a successful trial with heavy limitations and conflicts of interest is nonetheless a successful trial, making this meme inaccurate. The second study I linked is stronger.
Also, the limitations in the first trial are standard for many clinical trials. For example:
I could list 100 more with the same limitations of the first study I linked above. High dropout, small sample sizes, funding by an industry with a conflict of interest etc. are standard for clinical trial studies.
The study found no differences in the first four weeks. More than 10% dropped out during the study. The study was too small a sample to draw any serious conclusions from. The conclusions they did draw from were a subsample of people they declared treatment resistant. They even say in the paper their isn’t enough data to suggest their was any benefit, just not forcefully enough. Just enough to make low information readers think the study was successful.
This study was done in response to two other studies. One which showed no benefit another that suggested a benefit, but the study lacked a control group. So no meaningful conclusion could be drawn.
Finally the researchers were funded by ‘health supplement’ groups.
I'm not saying the study is good, just that the meme isn't true.
Also, you can level almost every single one of those criticisms against many studies for SSRIs and they'd hit just as hard. The exception being sample size.
maybe if it causes liver failure, but it won't even get into blood so unlikely
if you get around that, then yeah liver failure cases happened
Importantly, means of increasing the bioavailability of curcumin were developed using piperine (black pepper) or nanoparticle delivery methods to increase absorption. These high bioavailability forms of turmeric were subsequently linked to several cases of liver injury and mentioned as a possible cause of outbreaks of acute hepatitis with jaundice in Italy.
We just tried to find the quantity of curcuminoids in curcuma if it was boiled before being turned into powder compared to not being boiled.
We tried to use the HPLC, but it seems that our samplesclogged the column. So we failed 😅.
For our abstract, we did look at other studies on the supposed benefits of curcuma, but none of them were rigorous enough to say that there is a benefit (for example, one study informed the people being tested if they got curcuma or anotherantiinflammatory medicine, which already biases the results)
Same. Suffered from chronic tendonitis in my shoulders. Cortisone shots helped tremendously but it kept coming back once I resumed lifting. 11 months off lifting and it immediately returned once I resumed and thought I was going to have to give up lifting altogether.
Read some studies about Tumeric and thought... what the heck, easy and cheap enough to try it out. Absolutely unexpected results taking 1000mg daily. Tendonitis gone and hasn't returned after years now of constant heavy lifting. New PRs and blood work show extremely low inflammation (c reactive protein).
Later found our my friend, a house cleaner, thought she was going to have to retire early because of arthritis in her hands and she couldn't afford to. She too tried it with low expectations but she swears by it like I do.
Maybe it doesn't work for everyone and maybe they'll figure out why someday... I don't know. It's absolutely changed my life though. Simple and fairly inexpensive, and for me at least it works.