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Study Validates Benefits of 'Lorenzo's Oil'

Posted by timothy on from the regular-oil-changes dept.

Torvek writes "New Scientist has an article that discusses the medicinal oil from the Lorenzo movie. Apparently it's been proved to actually prevent the onset of symptoms when taken early enough."

3 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Reasons not to believe by Peter+T+Ermit · · Score: 5, Insightful
    1) The study doesn't appear to have been blinded.

    2) The study is performed by the guy who has the most to lose if it fails. Unavoidable sometimes, but it makes a study less credible.

    3) It looks like he's already had some failed trials with people who've shown an onset of symptoms. This affects the probability of having a false positive effect in your corpus of research -- a false positive that is sure to get headlines.

    4) Reading between the lines, it seems that their protocol was poor. "By the end of the study 76 per cent of the 68 boys getting the oil were still healthy and producing normal brain MRI scans. The same was true of no more than about one in three of the 36 boys who did not regularly get the oil."

    This sounds like everyone got the oil at the outset. 66% of those who stopped taking the oil had degeneration while 24% of those who continued did. But, of course, parents are much more likely to stop giving their children oil if they think it's not working, so the placebo group will be artificially enriched with failures and the oil group will be artificially enriched with successes. But I can't say for sure because...

    5) The study hasn't been peer-reviewed or even published.

    1. Re:Reasons not to believe by Peter+T+Ermit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's true that peer review doesn't guarantee quality anymore than a score>=1 filter guarantees that you'll only see coherent, intelligent, and articulate posts on Slashdot. That being said, though, I'll wait until Mr. Lorenzo's Oil gets modded up a few points by his peers before I take him too seriously.

  2. Sure, you say that now... by joto · · Score: 3, Insightful
    But if it was your son/daughter that had the disease, I'm sure you wouldn't hesitate to buy snake^H^H^H^H^HLorenzo's oil, even based only on anecdotical evidence. And in this case you would base your purchase not only on anecdotical evidence, but statistical evidence too.

    The problem with such wonder-drugs nobody understands, is that it after a while becomes very difficult to find a group not taking the drug, so you can know it's effects. And thus, you may never find out why it works.