Digestive enzymes, stomach acid, and all that...

[Guest guest]

Permit me to recommend to you (y'all) a couple of blog entries with some good

info about stomach acid, reflux, and all that.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/heartburn-cured/ (how it all

works, when it works right, and what can lead to it not working)

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/corn-eating-cow-crap-chuckin-up\

-your-insides-blues/

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/supplements/protexid-and-protexid-nd-and-adve\

ntures-in-dr/ (This offer of his has expired, I expect -- but the info is still

sound.)

About: proton pump inhibiting drugs:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/good-eating/another-reason-to-eat-grass-fed-b\

eef/

I've been reading Dr Eades for nearly a decade: I trust him. I have found him

to be honest, honorable, extremely deep-thinking. He has spent a chunk of his

blog dissecting and revealing how medical studies are badly done, or badly

reported: he actually reads the medical studies, not just the conclusions -- or

worse, the media reports of the conclusions -- and as was recently posted in the

Diabetes Update

(http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2010/05/what-health-media-missed-jama-study.\

html) blog:

===================

.... Almost always close reading of these studies finds statistical abuse so

blatant that one concludes that the peer reviewers who approved it for

publication flunked Statistics 101.

Now a study in JAMA quantifies just how bad this statistical abuse really is.

The study is,

Reporting and Interpretation of Randomized Controlled Trials With Statistically

Nonsignificant Results for Primary Outcomes. Isabelle Boutron et al. JAMA

2010;303(20):2058-2064.

....

What the JAMA study found was that in 72 studies where the primary outcome

resulted in a statistically nonsignificant result there was significant " spin. "

Spin was defined thus:

...specific reporting strategies, whatever their motive, to highlight that

the experimental treatment is beneficial, despite a statistically nonsignificant

difference for the primary outcome, or to distract the reader from statistically

nonsignificant results

In plain English, " spin " means claiming some treatment works when the statistics

show it does not.

How frequent was spin? The JAMA Study finds:

The title was reported with spin in 13 articles (18.0%)

Spin was identified in the Results and Conclusions sections of the abstracts

of 27 (37.5%) and 42 (58.3%) reports, respectively, with the conclusions of 17

(23.6%) focusing only on treatment effectiveness.

Spin was identified in the main-text Results, Discussion, and Conclusions

sections of 21 (29.2%), 31 (43.1%), and 36 (50.0%) reports, respectively.

More than 40% of the reports had spin in at least 2 of these sections in the

main text.

So no, I am not paranoid when I assert that peer reviewers approve the

publication of studies that claim results where none occurred, based on

ignorance of how statistics work.

....

===================

Hope you find the info helpful,

Elenor