Diversitti

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Low dose naltrexone

Please note policy WP:MEDRS which states that Wikipedia should take a cosnervative view on the reporting of experiemntal treatments - the trials you have added do not meet this standard.Martinlc (talk) 14:19, 25 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up regarding that policy; I'm an infrequent contributor, and so had not encountered it.

I've removed the http://www.ldndatabase.com/ reference. This was not presented as an authoritative source on the topic of LDN, but rather as an illustration of the claim that there are numerous anecdotal patient reports online covering a large variety of different diseases. So, I don't think that it is actually a violation of the WP:MEDRS policy, but it could be considered original research, and therefore a violation of WP:NOR, so I've removed it for that reason.

The quote on safety and tolerability of LDN is directly from study results, and the study itself is from Stanford by leading researchers, and it appears in a peer-reviewed journal, so I think that one conforms to policy. I'd note that while secondary sources that give a summary of present research are considered preferable, they are not available in this case, and I've quoted primary sources conservatively from results only, as suggested by WP:MEDRS.

All of the other references added as new by me seem to follow those same standards (quoting published studies in peer-reviewed journals, keeping to their stated results), but at this point I should say that in refactoring the article I moved some pre-existing references around and I'm guessing that you might have found some of those moved references to be in violation of WP:MEDRS, and perhaps thought that I had introduced them myself.

In particular, the Novella reference seems problematic. Being a fairly infrequent contributor here, I did not have the temerity to remove it, but it appears to me that the main thrust of that article is not to present information about LDN, but rather to make meta-comments about the patient community's supposed gullibility on that topic.

That site's declared purpose involves debunking misinformation, and "debunking" approaches to a topic presume some pre-existing "bunk" that, in Wikipedia at least, should not exist in the first place. It seems to me that Wikipedia is intended to provide primarily positive content about a topic, without making assumptions about, and then countering, pre-existing views that may be held by some within the general population.

In my (admittedly inexperienced) view, the subject of a Wikipedia article (in this case, LDN) should also be the main focus of its referenced articles, rather than presenting a reference that is only secondarily about the topic, and is mainly an extended meta-comment regarding the perceived views of others on that topic, which moves us into the realm of debate on a tangential matter. Not that there were no facts about LDN in the referenced article, with which I found much regarding which I agree, but the main thrust of it was not the presentation of the facts (about LDN) themselves.

I'm really too junior to take this into my own hands, but if you agree with what I've written above, you might consider re-writing the article to remove or replace this reference, as well as any suggestions of a polemical tone that it might have brought with it into the article.

Thanks. The trouble with quoting single studies is it leaves the reader to evaluate for themselves whether a specific p value and protocol indicates clinically significant outcome. The section on experimental treatments might be summarised as 'promising but unproven' - this would change when a review is published which independently recommened a change in practice 9and it is notable that the authors of the papers do not do this - they merely say that further research is justified. I have looked at the AIDS studies in detail, and their methodology is very unorthodox. In normal circumstances wiki content decisions can be quite relaxed but in this context there are many pseudo-scientific websites making completely unevidenced claims and therefore the policy discouraging primary sources and citation of pilot studies needs to be applied strictly. Martinlc (talk) 18:37, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that AIDS study was one of the references that I just moved around while editing, but it was entered in February by one Bill Way so I didn't validate it myself (I see that you improved his edit at the time):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Low-dose_naltrexone&diff=539800188&oldid=534218228

"Promising but unproven" as a title for the section presently labeled "Scientific research" seems misleading, as the Multiple Sclerosis studies are not very promising, while the other studies each offer proof to a degree.

I have edited the page to reflect WP:MEDRS - please use the article's talk page to discuss any new additions to the article. Martinlc (talk) 09:30, 12 October 2013 (UTC)