I would advise that the person with domain knowledge of medicine should also be someone who has read the books in question. “Antioxidants have no/limited effect on cancer” is a cached thought among most medics, mostly based on some incredibly badly-run studies (especially the ones by Moertel which a high-school student should have been failed on). The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_therapy sums up much of the arguments on both sides though.
I would advise that the person with domain knowledge of medicine should also be someone who has read the books in question.
There are less costly ways of signaling that it’s worthwhile to study more (if it is) than having to read whole books. That and if there are no papers that hold any convincing power would be evidence for the ideas being wrong.
True. There are papers that hold convincing power, but I couldn’t (and currently can’t) remember the references (there are roughly 1100 references in the longer of those books, and I checked most of them, but six years ago when it was written). I didn’t mean to imply that those were the only sources of information (though to my mind they’re the best and most complete). I probably shouldn’t have said ‘read the books in question’, but definitely I think one needs to have at least looked at some of this information before discussing it.
The original paper by Pauling and Cameron (still, alas, the only formal study to be done on patients with more than relatively tiny dosages) can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC431183/?tool=pmcentrez , for example. I co-authored a paper about five years ago that showed that Cameron and Pauling’s results couldn’t be explained by any selection biases, but I can’t find any record of us having got round to publishing it. I’ll have to chase that up...
I would advise that the person with domain knowledge of medicine should also be someone who has read the books in question. “Antioxidants have no/limited effect on cancer” is a cached thought among most medics, mostly based on some incredibly badly-run studies (especially the ones by Moertel which a high-school student should have been failed on). The wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox_therapy sums up much of the arguments on both sides though.
There are less costly ways of signaling that it’s worthwhile to study more (if it is) than having to read whole books. That and if there are no papers that hold any convincing power would be evidence for the ideas being wrong.
True. There are papers that hold convincing power, but I couldn’t (and currently can’t) remember the references (there are roughly 1100 references in the longer of those books, and I checked most of them, but six years ago when it was written). I didn’t mean to imply that those were the only sources of information (though to my mind they’re the best and most complete). I probably shouldn’t have said ‘read the books in question’, but definitely I think one needs to have at least looked at some of this information before discussing it.
The original paper by Pauling and Cameron (still, alas, the only formal study to be done on patients with more than relatively tiny dosages) can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC431183/?tool=pmcentrez , for example. I co-authored a paper about five years ago that showed that Cameron and Pauling’s results couldn’t be explained by any selection biases, but I can’t find any record of us having got round to publishing it. I’ll have to chase that up...
But there are lists of references at the end of both http://www.tomlevymd.com/news/VitaminC_Cancer_w_Comments.pdf and http://www.encognitive.com/files/Cancer%20and%20Vitamin%20C%20Therapy%20for%20Patients.pdf for example (two things I found by googling appropriate terms) that look like they contain a reasonable selection of papers.
(ETA added the last half of the last sentence in the first paragraph, because forgot to type it.)