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You apparently do not understand how the evaluation of medicine works. You have to prove efficacy vs a placebo in a test with a control that only receives the placebo (double blind test).

Trials do not refute anything, they can only prove that something works, never that it does not work.




What sort of semantic game are you playing? If you have a large RCT that shows no effect of Ivermectin, its efficacy is refuted, for all intents and purposes. I don't know how else you would phrase it.


No, there is no semantic game here.

You can prove something works but you can not prove something does not work. You might get a different result at different dosage, timing, some other random factor. You can only prove that it works in a certain setting and with a certain dosage.

It's like proving a negative.

For a nice example: water is normally not toxic. But in large enough quantities it is toxic. That doesn't mean that water isn't normally safe to consume, it normally is. But in certain circumstances it can be lethal.

Similar for other molecules.


> It's like proving a negative.

"You can't prove a negative" is one of dopey philosophical slogans[1] that are meaningless in practice. It gives undue weight to absolutes that do not exist in reality. The statement "money doesn't grow on trees" is obviously true, yet you can't logically rule out the existence of such a tree. What are the practical implications of this? None.

If we tested a hypothesis thoroughly, we can say that it is true or not true, not with absolute platonic certainty, but for all intents and purposes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo


Again, you don't understand how testing for medicine efficacy works. Your comment history shows long exchanges where you end up in the same spot as where you started without gaining any insight so I am not going to continue this conversation, life is way too short as it is. An attempt was made to explain something to you, it is then up to you to extract value.

Have a good day, nevertheless.


> Again, you don't understand how testing for medicine efficacy works.

I understand perfectly well how the process works. I understand your objection. It is not wrong, it is merely of no consequence.

Outside the realm of logical posturing, "evidence of absence" is valid. In the real world, you need to distinguish between there being "no evidence (but we haven't looked)" and "no evidence (but we have looked everywhere)" and everything in between. Any treatment starts out unproven, but as the evidence of absence mounts, the impetus to look even further dwindles, to the point where a treatment can be considered proven ineffective, again, for all intents and purposes.




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