alt Hacker News> There is a tension between empiricism and fundamentalism with much of medical science focusing on fundamentalism.
This is a deeply unfair statement, and also a false dichotomy. Medical science is of course empiric. What you call "fundamentalism" is that compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people. And no, it's not just because of Thalidomide. Many, many compounds fail clinical trials because of severe side effects, like liver toxicity, severe immune reactions or heart problems. Then there's of course increased risk of cancer, which can take many years to manifest itself empirically. You argue that you prefer living with these uncertainties rather than ME/CFS, and that's of course entirely understandable, but disparaging the field of medical science as focused on "fundamentalism" because we do not give large patient cohorts untested compounds is polemic. I understand where you are coming from, and I'm sorry that you suffer from this terrible condition, but likewise, you should try to understand the other side.
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>compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people
Particularly when the mechanism behind most of these peptides comes down to "promotes more rapid cell growth". The intent may be to repair the skin, muscles, or ligaments, but biology is rarely that specific.
I think the grandparent meant "fundamentalism" as "mechanistic", and lots of things we can know (as you say using the scientific method) to be useful long before we have a good mechanistic explanation of how they work.
Some examples: aspirin (willow bark used for thousands of years, drug synthesized in 1897 and mechanism explained almost 100y later), or general anesthesia used again since mid 1800s and the mechanism is quite still debated.
This is not to downplay all the long term, or developmental, risks that using something novel can result in. But we can empirically know something about the effects without having good mechanistic models.
Doctors have been maligning ME/CFS as psychosamatic for decades and generally still do despite a large amount of modern evidence to the contrary. If you have it it’s clearly not, you can get good and bad days that are clearly not dependent on psychological state. In addition I have it due to hEDS which is a condition that is almost never diagnosed due to aforementioned blind spots. Most doctors still think the prevalence rate is 1/50K despite continued research raising that number to 1/15K and 1/500. It takes a long time for this information to percolate through the system.
Doctors, like many professions, have institutional blind spots, I studied these in my search because I was looking for something that had not been found. Most doctors have to consider all people and all conditions, I only have to be concerned with one.
Notably they only recently adopted Bayesian statistics for medical trials despite that math being around for hundreds of years.