enziobodoni

But badgers eat primarily stoats and voles...

Comes from all walks, but some from those folks. Mostly folks with real problems, like those in these threads, but who have unwittingly entered into a predatory industry that relies on providing overly specific data to people with nonspecific problems.

That's not a double blind experiment, but I'd agree it points to an intolerance. Actual experiments, I will reiterate, are hard to do. Have you tried feeding your wife food devoid of known triggers but told her they were in the food? I would hope not, because it's not an ethical thing to do, but you need that sort of thing to nail it down. Also, since she seems to accidentally eat food of unknown provenance, can you be sure the times she's gotten away with it without symptoms that the food in question was truly devoid of triggers? In others words, it is very very easy to confirm that things are bad for you, correctly or not.

I think I might have missed what I meant to say. Can we be sure that is wasn't a self-limited condition that resolved at he same time as the dietary changes, but not because of them? That kind of thing happens a lot. People get over strep throat without penicillin, after all.

Micronutrients, even in hair. Trace metals, especially after chelation therapy, when the results are definitely misleading. Labs that associate Candida with everything. "Stealth" virus testing. Quack Lyme disease serology labs that always give positive results. Anti-malignin antibodies. Multi variate index assays predicting irritable bowel disease. IgG food allergies. Outrageously large (>50-100 component) IgE allergy tests.

It is devilishly difficult to separate correlation and causation. This difficulty has to be the reason why some forms of "medicine" persist, ie naturopathy will have to work sometime, just as a stopped watch is right twice a day. I would never be so foolish as to discount your story, however, without knowing the actual facts, and without acknowledging that some people do, in fact, have food allergies, celiac sprue, etc... The problem is that not nearly as many people actually have these things as they might believe. And, combined with the STRONG financial motivation for folks to exploit the sufferings of others like yourself, my point is just hat its devilishly hard to make sense of anything.

Believing that everything yet undisproven is somehow valid or worth study does not indicate open-mindedness, necessarily. The question you ask also presupposes that there has been no formal experimentation on his sort of thing before, which is not true. We know much that supports the old saw that, "the dose makes the poison," gleaned from years and years of study of environmental toxicology. One of my favorite musicians, Tim Minchin, once said that if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.

I run a hospital lab, and I see requests for testing for all sorts of bizarre things, largely by naturopaths, deriving from the "philosophy" expressed here. We refer to people who believe this stuff as being on the "Quest for Purity", a quixotic drive to remove all "toxins" from their bodies. Regardless of whether or not there are substantiated examples of low doses of chemicals causing effects, the worry about this problem being widespread is a very common delusion that consumes an enormous amount of attention and money, is preyed upon by charlatan doctors (or naturopaths, who call themselves doctors), and is incredibly confounding. The rub in these potential illnesses is that you can never actually remove any of these exposures completely, and thus you are required to continue to purchase diagnostics, cures, and consultations forever. If there is a true toxicobiologic effect in here, it will be essentially impossible to discern from the obvious and overriding psychiatric issues and financial conflicts at play.

As someone who got my PhD in Roger Tsien's lab at that time and attended the Nobel ceremony, I strongly agree with this comment, that it was no one's intent. Many people interpret this story as though Tsien or Chalfie stole something from Doug Prasher, which isn't true. This is more a story that science is hard, people don't always follow through on projects, and there is also some luck involved. There are plenty of "fourth" people who didn't get Nobel Prizes.

This reminds me a bit of when Sarah Palin derided worm research (C elegans), ignorant of the fact that such research was the backbone of genetics and neurobiology research.

And then what.... Rock Paper Scissors for which one is correct?

You misunderstand Bayes. The point is that the test is the test, and the information value is all dependent on the person getting it, not the test.

You are demonstrably wrong about the vitamin d. What if it was a specimen swap, and the lab screwed up and tested someone else's blood instead of yours? This happens.

We already monitor all sorts of anticoagulation. Fingerstick samples are particularly bad for this (even though there are current point of care devices that do this).

The 10b valuation is nuts. That's more than LabCorp or Quest, two companies that already do lab actual lab tests on real instruments for hundreds of millions of people. Yes, it looks like you can get results online from Theranos, but you can do this for lots of labs, as well. Theranos' app is undoubtedly slicker...Silicon Valley can afford better software people than labs can. As for improvements in labs today.... Our financial structure is crazy. Fee for service drives more testing, when in fact the main problem in US medicine right now is that we do too much testing (overall...there are still some areas where we need to do more). The solution to test overutilization is not making tests cheaper so folks can get more tests at Walgreens. One answer could be the current ACO model (or it's logical extension, single payer or socialized medicine) in which the goal of care is the health of the patient, not the profit. Once hospitals and labs are payed by the person, not by the test, we're gonna find lots of surprising ways to stop letting folks get tests they don't need, since the answers to those tests will often be misleading, require expensive follow up, etc... To the folks on this discussion who think that they would prefer to be able to go and get frequent tests (or, god forbid, get frequent Lyme serologies, which borders on outright quackery), I would say this: you can't handle the truth. Really. There is a reason why we put doctors as gatekeepers between patients and medical services like MRIs, lab tests, and chemotherapy. It's called Bayes Theorem (it's on Wikipedia). If it's exceedingly unlikely that something is wrong with you before you get a test, then it's still exceedingly unlikely you have the condition even when you get a positive test for it. This breaks down when the doctor does a bad job, since it's the doctor's job to select tests only in those with higher pretest probabilities, but it is an inescapable issue. I realize also that suggesting that laypeople are too ignorant to take their own health into their own hands sounds not even a little elitist, but it is sorta true. One of the main concerns for healthy people should be staying OUT of the medical care system, because we hurt people sometimes, even when we help them. The lab is a gateway to the medical care system, so unless you want to go through the gate, stay away.