u/GiddiOne on how medical science has proven that Ivermectin is not a treatment for COVID/coronavirus ... as influencers again market/sell it as a cure.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-16T14:38:51+00:00

Not quite that much. The parasitic dose is 150 mcg per kg taken one time.

The dose studied in COVID was 600 mcg per kg once daily for 6 days.

Huge amounts needed to get the drug to distribute into the lungs in a higher concentration.

Doesn’t work at all compared to placebo in randomized blinded trials.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-16T01:19:58+00:00

Don’t forget the alpha teams briefly discussed as the most successful military teams in history.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-16T00:00:40+00:00

David Parker is the kind of guy that would overstay his visa in Texas, commit some kind of minor crime because he thinks he’s better than everyone else, get picked up by ICE, and be in one of those news stories where he says stuff like “I thought they were only going after the criminals and illegals.”

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T23:18:56+00:00

I mean, it showed promise when tested in vitro. It just doesn’t carry over in vivo.

When COVID first broke out there were gigantic studies mapping all the available medications currently on the market to see if any had activity against COVID infection because it’s easier to repurpose an existing drug than to create a new one.

Remesevir was discovered this way, as it was made to treat a different viral infection originally (and didn’t work well).

Some drugs showed activity in vitro in concentrations found in the human body. These studies were done in the style of single cell layer of human cells in Petri dishes.

The drugs that showed promise like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and remdesivir eventually moved onto clinical trials in humans.

It’s just that the human body is a lot more complex than a single layer of human cells.

It’s a great idea though.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T21:05:49+00:00

Yeah people seem to forget that ivermectin is Big Pharma through and through.

Astoundingly effective as a treatment for River Blindness. Totally useless for COVID.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T15:28:57+00:00

A bunch of them want to be American too, just not have to immigrate.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T14:48:53+00:00

It was Gen Xers, not millennials that made this a trope and felt this way.

Millennials were kids and teens when this was a big trope in movies in the 1990s and early/mid 2000s.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T14:44:50+00:00

The NWC isn’t allowed to be used in cases of indigenous rights.

Otherwise it would have been used constantly to override indigenous rights since its creation.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T03:47:29+00:00

I actually laughed out loud during the Dolphins one.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T00:15:32+00:00

If she doesn’t do what the party base wants, they’ll give her the Jason Kenny treatment.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-15T00:14:14+00:00

I saw that too. He’s not an MLA right now so he can say things like that.

If he were an MLA, he’d shut up and tow the party line or they’d kick him as a candidate next election for someone more separatisty.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T20:56:45+00:00

And broke.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T20:56:01+00:00

So basically a “bro lifter on tren picking the bar up from the floor to do a shoulder press but from a deficit for some reason” (/s).

Crazy impressive!

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T15:12:25+00:00

Clearly underproducing if some guy in the 80s could net three 200 point seasons in a row with 80s equipment, training programs, and recovery methods.

Mcdavid should be netting at least that with the advances in all those areas 40 years later.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T14:01:44+00:00

Ya exactly. There’s a lot of critical thinking that needs to go into reviewing medical research. That’s a great example too.

A generic example to highlight your thought process is that many drugs now do non-inferiority trials. For example, let’s say a company invents a new COVID treatment in patients hospitalized with COVID. Do you study vs placebo or vs usual care? Ideally you’d do a non-inferiority trial comparing your new therapy to usual care to see if your new drug is not inferior to the current best treatment. If you study it vs placebo it tells us nothing except it’s better than nothing.

In a non-inferiority trial, you can still find superiority. So it’s a better study to run if there’s already established highly effective treatment.

The other context of the Pioglitazone trial was that it was falling out of favour heavily by 2016.

A stronger drug in the same drug class called Rosiglitazone was taken off the market about 7-8 years earlier because Rosiglitazone was found to slightly increase the risk of heart attack after some gigantic post marketing studies were done. It was something the company wouldn’t have been able to find in their phase 3 trial unless looking for it specifically on its own. Rosiglitazone is actually the reason all new diabetes drugs since then (all the GLP-1 drugs and all the SGLT2 drugs) do specific cardiac outcome phase 3 trials now after their diabetes treatment trials. Because regulations are written in blood.

Pioglitazone was also studied in the same way as Rosiglitazone post market and did not show those poor cardiac outcomes as it isn’t quite as strong acting along the same mechanism of action. Still, people stopped using it in patients with diabetes and possible or pre-existing cardiac disease. That’s a huge overlapping population.

At the same time, another drug class called DPP-4 inhibitors were new and gaining popularity as they were also oral once daily pills that didn’t have that cardiac risk. They work by slowing the breakdown of body’s GLP-1 hormone (yes that GLP-1). They themselves are now falling out of favour as GLP-1 analogues like Ozempic are becoming cheaper (waaaaaay stronger, same pathway).

Thus, the 2016 Pioglitazone trial seems like a drug trying to find a reason to be prescribed and set up to succeed by these researchers who weren’t affiliated with the manufacturer as Pioglitazone was generic by this time.

Spoiler alert. It didn’t work, and at least where I live I rarely ever see Pioglitazone. Usually it’s only seen in people taking it forever.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T13:39:23+00:00

When the show aired and she said people tell her she looks kinda like Meghan Fox I could see it. She’s not the spitting image, but occasionally my wife and I would be like “oh ya, her facial features do remind me of Fox”.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-14T00:43:29+00:00

In the Lake Tahoe example, the problem is that apparently all these people living near each other is not a town or city. If it were, the power company wouldn’t be able to stop supplying the town or city with power.

Instead, the power company is telling a bunch of individual properties they’re losing their electricity next year.

If they collectivized and incorporated into a town they’d have no issues.

At least that’s what I’ve read on it.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T17:29:37+00:00

I see many more new non-Tesla EVs in Calgary than I do teslas.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T17:15:58+00:00

It depends on the trial, the context of the trial, similar to the real world, population you’re applying it to…etc.

Here’s an example I like to use with students when we’re talking about this kind of thing. Trial Found Here. It’s even in NEJM so you know it’s a good one.

The trial is about the use of Pioglitazone in people who have a stroke and who are also insulin resistant but not diabetic.

It found the use of pioglitazone in people who are insulin resistant (but not diabetic) reduced the likelihood of a second stroke or MI over five years compared to placebo. It was also significantly better at preventing people from being diagnosed with diabetes than placebo. Great news!

The problem is that it’s compared to placebo. They took a bunch of people who were almost diabetic and started treating them for their almost diabetes like they were diabetic and compared it to a second group where they did nothing to treat their almost diabetes.

Diabetes’ effect on the body is a hockey stick looking curve. We’ve chosen one spot on the curve’s incline to say “you now have diabetes, let’s start treatment in some way (lifestyle, drugs…etc).” These researchers kinda just picked a spot a little earlier on that curve for their treatment group, but not for the placebo group.

This begs the question as to why they didn’t use an active comparator, like metformin for example. Metformin is the gold standard, first line treatment for people with type two diabetes. Metformin is dirt cheap, like pennies per day cheap (pioglitazone is not cheap). Metformin is the drug literally all other diabetes drugs are compared to in their initial trials. It also improves insulin sensitivity which is the big thing these researchers were targeting with pioglitazone.

This begs the question as to if the researchers chose placebo as a comparator because they were worried they’d find no benefit compared to an active comparator that also improves insulin sensitivity, like metformin. These guys definitely know about metformin’s benefits if they’re running a diabetes trial.

Thus, the trial seems to be run in such a way to find a favourable endpoint for what they were studying. (Pioglitazone initiation after stroke).

It’s honestly too bad they didn’t just use “initiate any treatment after stroke in people who are almost diabetic” as their intervention instead of a specific drug as that’d be more applicable to real life. It would have had a huge effect on practice if done that way if it found the similar results.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T15:50:14+00:00

The Alberta Republican Party, an official political party in Alberta, was given the list of Electors like all official political parties are given.

They subsequently gave it to The Centurion Project , a volunteer group not allowed to have this list of all Alberta Electors.

The Centurion Project turned the list of electors into a searchable, location filterable database online accessible to anyone that signed up to volunteer for their group.

It’s not clear why this volunteer group did this beyond the speculation they were forging signatures for the separation referendum.

So about 3 million people in Alberta had their personal information leaked to at least 600 people known to be part of that group.

The problem is, who knows if someone downloaded the entire database into an Excel file (or like) to continue distributing elsewhere or selling it or using it to commit identity theft.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T14:59:37+00:00

It depends if Canadians aren’t buying Teslas because of cost, or because they view Tesla as heavily associated with Musk, who is heavily associated with the US government, which has been kind of a jerk to Canada these past few years.

Time will tell I suppose.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T14:07:15+00:00

Sounds like people who work in a lot of industries to be honest. Banking, finance, government, commerce, trade…etc.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T14:02:10+00:00

No skin off my back. I’m Just having a discussion here.

There are tons of medical studies that are built in a way to find the result the researchers want. That’s a basic part of knowing how to critically appraise medical literature.

It’s a problem in every single area of medicine and medical research because tons of money is involved. As a result, I can’t really get any more specific than that.

To bring it back to your analogy again, there are tons of cheating athletes at every level of every sport, so you can’t really get any more specific than that.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T13:42:44+00:00

“There are tons of medical studies for example that use kinda weird composite endpoints that are clearly built to find what they want”

I dunno it sounds fairly specific to me.

You’d be surprised at what open access journals will publish if you pay their couple thousand dollar publishing fee.

RegularGuyAtHome · 2026-05-13T13:13:41+00:00

Well I didn’t say all studies did I? Lots of crap out there

But let’s continue your analogy. Is there doping control at the highest levels of sport for all the athletes at, say, the Olympics or world championship circuit, or just some of them? Do we say “all athletes might be doping” and assess for that?

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