My Gut Crusade

[Beyond]

Yeah, there is no none human study showing its repairing effects on the intestine, so that´s why I didn´t post it.

I doubt the effects Chlorella has on rat´s intestines differ significantly from what it does to humans. I mainly think rat or animal studies are pretty cruel but otherwise better than nothing.

 

[MeSci]

Yeah, there is no none human study showing its repairing effects on the intestine, so that´s why I didn´t post it.

I doubt the effects Chlorella has on rat´s intestines differ significantly from what it does to humans. I mainly think rat or animal studies are pretty cruel but otherwise better than nothing.

They're not better than nothing, unfortunately. The inapplicability of animal 'models' has been my specialist freelance research subject, and I've studied it in great depth.

They are as likely to give the wrong answer as the right answer, so as well as wasting money and being cruel, they lead down blind alleys and delay medical progress.

I have written some blogposts on the subject, such as this one.

People have been led astray by the ubiquity of this flawed research, and it has become the norm, so most people don't question it.

Sadly it means that patients waste a lot of time reading and reporting the stuff - time which would be better spent looking at human-relevant research.

 

[Beyond]

If you have done your research I respect that. I agree human studies are preferable but they have very marked limits i.e. one cannot "kill humanly human subjects" and inspect their spleen/whatever after drugging them merceilessly or causing "chronic stress" (Guantánamo style). So I think that´s why scientists valuate animal research, permits taking advantage of the moral gap of humanity regarding "inferior lifeforms". I dislike this a lot of course and if you are right then it makes it all worse as the suffering inflicted is for nothing.

 

[MeSci]

If you have done your research I respect that. I agree human studies are preferable but they have very marked limits i.e. one cannot "kill humanly human subjects" and inspect their spleen/whatever after drugging them merceilessly or causing "chronic stress" (Guantánamo style). So I think that´s why scientists valuate animal research, permits taking advantage of the moral gap of humanity regarding "inferior lifeforms". I dislike this a lot of course and if you are right then it makes it all worse as the suffering inflicted is for nothing.

Yes - I try to separate the ethics from the science as it can cloud the discussions. But the paradigm of animal 'models' seems to be as hard to shift in the public perception as the paradigm of ME being a mental illness. Once a norm becomes established, it acquires its own momentum and people become less and less inclined to doubt the fundamental concepts.

It's often not so much that a scientist values the use of animals, but that they can't get funding for a more-expensive but more-relevant human study, or even that the licensing and funding authorities insist on testing hypotheses in non-humans, as my latest blog entry shows. A cancer researcher says with incredulity and frustration:

I decided to study a bone marrow malignant disease called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) which frequently evolves to acute leukemia, back in the early 1980s. One decision I made very early on was to concentrate my research on freshly obtained human cells and not to rely on mice or petri dishes alone. In the last 3 decades, I have collected over 50,000 bone marrow biopsies, blood, normal control buccal smear cells, serum and plasma samples in a well annotated Tissue Repository backed by a computerized bank of clinical, pathologic and morphologic data. By using these samples, we have identified novel genes involved in causing certain types of MDS, as well as sets of genes related to survival, natural history of the disease and response to therapy. But when I used bone marrow cells from treated MDS patients to develop a genomic expression profile which was startlingly predictive of response and applied for an NIH grant to validate the signature, the main criticism was that before confirming it through a prospective trial in humans, I should first reproduce it in mice!

 

[heyitisjustin]

Hey good luck with the 5-HTP. It caused me depersonalization!! Pretty interesting feeling, waking up in the middle of the night in panic because you don´t remember who or where you are (I have never got this after waking up).

I get worsening depersonalization (it never really goes away) with blood sugar swings and too much 5HTP. Have you found out anything else about your depersonalization?