nonbel

This is the second study showing vitamin C is depleted in covid patients: https://ccforum.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13054-02...

Obviously I am saying the standard explanation is the one with the causality backwards.

Figure3 shows plasma levels following a 36g dose of liposomal vitamin C, for both subjects. This resulted in peak plasma levels, in the region of 400mML21. A 95% interfractile range (34–114), which contains 95% of the distribution with a mean of 74 corresponds to a calculated standard deviation of 17.4. We note that, under these conditions, an outlier measurement of 400mML21 would correspond to a deviation of 10.3 s with a theoretical p-value of 1.6610213 (i.e. p,0.0000000000001). With this high dose, both subjects exceeded their bowel tolerance, leading to diarrhoea. This intolerance presumably arose from the high intake of phospholipid, without food buffering, in fasting individuals. However, our observations using hourly doses suggest that daily intakes of this magnitude are tolerable without bowel effects, as long as the dose is spread throughout the day. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1359084080230542...

It's interesting that a side effect of pretty much every treatment for cancer is nausea, weight loss, etc. Almost like reduced nutrient absorption is the main mechanism by which the treatments work.

You could say that about every preclinical or clinical trial. If no one good at promotion had an interest in the treatment it would never get funded.

Most treatments studied are patented drugs, I never see these types of comments about those.

Thanks, not what I was thinking it sounds like.

Regarding quantum states as degrees of belief implies that the event of a quantum state changing when a measurement occurs—the "collapse of the wave function"—is simply the agent updating her beliefs in response to a new experience. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism

You could be right, That is what this sounds like to me though. According to the model there is a 50% chance the coin will land on heads, until you flip it.

From my reading, they would say some particles are just much more energetic than usual (for some reason we are ignorant of). See the post above about flipping a coin. According to the statistical model we use for coin flips, it is really unlikely to flip 100 heads in a row but not impossible.

Sounds like the wave model describes the statistical properties of a population of photons.

Eg, a coin flip is deterministic if you know all the forces involved (airflow, force of flip, exact distribution of mass of the coin, etc). But since we are usually ignorant of all that, instead we model it as a bernoulli trial.

But who is going to go to a doctor/hospital for the flu when they are scared of catching sars2 there?

Makes some sense, but that got me wondering if medical guidelines are going to start getting updates every few weeks like web browsers do.

First, check the warburg hypothesis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_hypothesis

Cancer cells rely much more on glycolysis than oxidative phosphorylation (respiration, basically breaking down sugar with oxygen). You get a net of two molecules of ATP from glycolysis compared to 30 or so from respiration, so you can expect that cancer cells need much more sugar than normal cells just to survive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_respiration

Second, glucose competes with dehydroascorbate (DHA, oxidized vitamin c) for glut1/3 transporters. DHA gets transported into cells (in particular RBC's) to be reduced back to the anti-oxidant form by glutathione: ascorbate. Then that ascorbate molecule can remain in the cell acting as an antioxidant or be pumped back out of the cell to the blood, etc.

If DHA doesn't make it into a cell quickly it gets hydrolyzed and excreted and you lose that molecule of vitamin c. So chronically lower blood sugar is expected to conserve your vitamin c and allow higher ascorbate levels, especially within your cells.

This can have all sorts of beneficial effects. Strengthened collagen makes it easier for a tissue to heal/encapsulate the cancer and harder for it to metastasize, quenching free radicals can prevent damage to surrounding tissue, etc.

But also, cancer cells accumulate more iron than normal cells: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983609/

Ascorbate can also reduce Fe3+ iron to the Fe2+ form. That Fe2+ iron can then undergo the fenton reaction to form free radicals: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF03033342

Those free radicals can go onto to kill the (high iron) cancer cells. For this reason vitamin C kills almost all cancer cell lines in vitro at doses that do not harm normal cells: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2516281/

I met someone who went for a checkup and they convinced him to get a screening colonoscopy. It was clear but a few months later he started having problems and went back. Then they told him he had colon cancer caused by damage to the tissue during the colonoscopy.

You keep attaching a lot of Pubmed links, but frankly, in this case at least, they aren't all that compelling and don't even begin to approach a scientific consensus.

Which of these statements do you find controversial?

1) Skin cancer rates are rising dramatically

2) Until very recently (in the last ten years) the vast majority of sunblock was transparent to UVA but opaque to UVB

3) Blocking UVB prevents the skins normal darkening and thickening response as well as sunburn

4) UVA penetrates the skin deeper than UVB and causes damage to the DNA in the cells there

5) Damage to the DNA of skin cells is associated with skin cancer

6) Without sunburn to warn people their skin is damaged they are more likely to leave their skin exposed to the sun.

2017 is a bit dated?

You think there is no consensus that skin cancer rates are skyrocketing?

There was no confusion of correlation and causation in my post. It is a clearly stated correlation.

Broad spectrum sunblock may be less than perfect, but until recently all sunblock was transparent to UVA. It blocked UVB which prevented the natural sunburn/tan/thickening response without preventing the DNA damage.

Given the huge growth in skin cancers since people started wearing sunblock it seems likely that it was actively harmful for this reason.

If I'm reading this right it looks like 3 yr survival was 30-50% in high risk melanoma patients in the late 1960s to early 1970s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1344342/

That is pretty much the same as in your paper. Not sure how comparable those patients are though.

Thanks, do you have one for melanoma in mind for comparison to that study when you say "used to be lethal".

I see, it should have been written "screening-detected" to be as clear as possible.

Yes, the latter is more likely to be comparable over time but it will still have issues with changes in how likely someone is to report it to their doctor, etc.

Please provide sources so we can see where these numbers are coming from.

I don't understand what you mean by "detected cancer" and "symptomatic cancer". Eg if a cancer is already detected then by definition it is impossible to screen for it.

There is a skin cancer pandemic since health authorities started warning people to avoid the sun. It is found mostly in people who avoid/block the sun and not eg people who work outside everyday.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20231499

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20541680

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1694089/

Also, tobacco smoke seems to be an exceptionally weak carcinogen. It is near impossible to get it to cause cancer in animals (while eg, radioactive dust easily does so). Think about it, people expose themselves almost 24 hrs per day for decades and still less than 25% get lung cancer.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15765916

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29370344

The people who don't know what they are talking about (or are maliciously feigning ignorance) are those who look at 5 yr survival without considering the effect of increased surveillance/screening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias

Nice link, thanks.

Can you point out one that was inconsistent with the foundations of physics? I suppose it is possible some were that radical.

Matter/anti-matter asymmetry is expected to be present. It is a basic feature of individual random walk instances using symmetrical laws that about half will be dominated by matter and the other half dominated by antimatter for long periods of time (although the "universe" may pass through pure energy states as it switches between the two). While there is a balance on average and in the long run, there is not for individual instances or points in time.

We called the dominating one for our current instance/state of the universe "matter": https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/505662/why-is-ma...

I don't see how what you wrote could possibly address concerns with adding parameters to the model until it explains current data so perfectly that it cannot generalize to future or other data.

This is not a "theory" problem, it has to do with matching the theory to observations.

If you can come up with 300 different explanations for a random blip, your theory is obviously very flexible. You are probably overfitting.

If your solution to the problem of not being able to generalize your model to new/other data is to add more parameters. You are probably overfitting.

These are the hallmarks of overfitting.

Sorry that you cannot learn from others and only expect them to learn from you.

How many free parameters do "the foundations of physics" allow?

I was concerned a few years back when a "blip" at CERN resulted in theoretical physicists publishing 300+ different theories to explain it in a short period of time. All of these theories were presumably consistent with "the foundations of physics". And I guess that "blip" got rejected as a not something worth explaining anyway.

Sounds like post-hoc overfitting to me.