User talk:WhichDoctor

Welcome to Wikipedia from the Wikiproject Medicine!

Welcome to Wikipedia and Wikiproject Medicine

Welcome to Wikipedia from Wikiproject Medicine (also known as WPMED).

We're a group of editors who strive to improve the quality of content about health here on Wikipedia, as part of the larger mission of Wikipedia to provide the public with articles that present accepted knowledge, created and maintained by a community of editors.

One of our members has noticed that you are interested in editing medical articles; it's great to have a new interested editor on board!

First, some basics about editing Wikipedia, which is a strange place behind the scenes; you may find some of the ways we operate to be surprising. Please take your time and understand how this place works. Here are some useful links, which have information to help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

• Everything starts with the mission - the mission of Wikipedia is to provide the public with articles that summarize accepted knowledge, working in a community of editors. (see WP:NOT)
• We find "accepted knowledge" for biomedical information in sources defined by WP:MEDRS -- we generally use literature reviews published in good journals or statements by major medical or scientific bodies and we generally avoid using research papers, editorials, and popular media as sources for such content. We read MEDRS sources and summarize them, giving the most space and emphasis (what we call WP:WEIGHT) to the most prevalent views found in MEDRS sources.
• Please see WPMED's "how to" guide for editing content about health
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Every article and page in Wikipedia has an associated talk page, and these pages are essential because we editors use them to collaborate and work out disagreements. (This is your Talk page, associated with your user page.) When you use a Talk page, you should sign your name by typing four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comment; the Wikipedia software will automatically convert that into links to your Userpage and this page and will add a datestamp. This is how we know who said what. We also "thread" comments in a way that you will learn with time. Please see the Talk Page Guidelines to learn how to use talk pages.

• Thanks for coming aboard! We always appreciate a new editor. Feel free to leave us a message at any time on our talk page. If you are interested in joining the project yourself, there is a participant list where you can sign up. You can also just add our talk page to your watchlist and join in discussions that interest you. Please leave a message on the WPMED talk page if you have any problems, suggestions, would like review of an article, need suggestions for articles to edit, or would like some collaboration when editing!
• The Wikipedia community includes a wide variety of editors with different interests, skills, and knowledge. We all manage to get along through a lot of discussion that happens under the scenes and through the bold, edit, discuss editing cycle. If you encounter any problems, you can discuss it on an article's talk page or post a message on the WPMED talk page.

Feel free to drop a note below if you have any questions or problems. I wish you all the best here in Wikipedia! Jytdog (talk) 00:10, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Some more...

Working in Wikipedia is kind of weird for experts. Please do review the Welcome message above, and please have a look at the WP:EXPERT essay which is super helpful. The genre here is encyclopedia, and what we do is summarize secondary sources (the places where experts in various fields express accepted knowledge in their fields); we don't generate anything new or establish anything here, as editors. It takes some time to get your feet down, on what we are up to..... Jytdog (talk) 00:42, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Steven M. Paul

you inspired me to create that article. Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 06:00, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Verbascum thapsus

On my talk page, you said: A while ago, you edited the Verbascum thapsus page to say "Although long used in herbal medicine, no high-quality clinical research has been conducted on Verbascum thapsus as of 2018, and there are no drugs manufactured from its components."

I know you were parroting straight from the drugs.com page, but consider how hard-to-prove that phrasing is. Did whoever wrote that page check every reputable scientific journal, in every language?

The answer is no, and I can tell you that for a fact because I did the most basic Scholar search imaginable to fact-check it: "Verbascum thapsus clinical". Result #5 was a >100-patient study from 2016 showing a significant effect on postsurgical pain in episiotomy. It's published in Persian, but there's an English abstract, and if you copy-paste the text of the full article into Google Translate you get a result that's at least intelligible enough to see that it's double blind and that they did their power calculations.

If by some chance you found that same article and know more than I do about which Iranian obstetrics journals are reputable and which aren't, please revert. Otherwise, please fact-check definitive "none exists" statements like that to the best of your ability before putting them in!

EDIT: so upon further reading of the MEDRS page I suppose that the source I cited is "too primary" to properly conform to those guidelines–sorry about that. What do we do when the secondary source is proven wrong by a primary source? I don't feel right leaving an objectively wrong fact in there; do we just delete the secondary source claim with no substitution?

The Iranian journal is not reliable. It has an impact factor well under 1.0 and is not Medline-indexed, two factors excluding it from reliability. The study was on a small number of subjects, so is primary research with results not replicated or reviewed in a WP:MEDRS source. Checking Pubmed, there are no reputable reviews on V. thapsus in medical journals, which is a reason for preferring Drugs.com as a reliable review source updated in Nov 2020. Zefr (talk) 22:07, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Nomination of Phil Strandwitz for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Phil Strandwitz is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Phil Strandwitz until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

Hulatam (talk) 15:19, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

January 2022

Hello, I'm Donald Albury. Wikipedia is written by people who have a wide diversity of opinions, but we try hard to make sure articles have a neutral point of view. Your recent edit to Elizabeth Loftus seemed less than neutral and has been removed. If you think this was a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Donald Albury 13:53, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

March 2022

Please do not add or change content, as you did at Fenugreek, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Don't use Healthline as a source for nutrition or medical content. It is a low-quality, often misleading source written by non-expert bloggers, and does not comply with WP:MEDRS. Zefr (talk) 17:37, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, suppose the way to do this would be to use @Zefr: rather than going back and forth on talk pages. Can we hash this out here rather than edit warring?

Apologies for posting Healthline as a source; I think I was conflating the RS guidelines (which, to my understanding, prefer layman summaries of academic literature as secondary sources) and the MEDRS guidelines, in which a review and meta-analysis seems to be acceptable.

That said, this is the second time we've gotten into debate on an herbal/traditional medicine page; the last was on Verbascum thapsus, if you recall. I learned from our last encounter, and only made the edit once I had found a reliable source per the goalposts you set during the mullein debate. During that discussion, I believe we also established a convention on what to do when claims are objectively contradicted, but by a primary or otherwise not-quite-up-to-snuff source, which was to remove or modify the demonstrably false claim, but without replacing it with a counterclaim.

I appreciate your work and your attitude; the skepticism is totally necessary to prevent wiki from being overrun with pseudoscientific and medical charlatanry. However, nearly all effective drugs are in some way derived from sources that have use in traditional systems of medicine, and pharmacognosy is the ongoing process of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak—figuring out which traditional remedies actually do something (and why), and which are superstition or pseudoscience. This particular tidbit, about fenugreek as a galactagogue, appears to be baby and not bathwater. I would really appreciate it if you tried to be less of a revert-policeman and more of a collaborator; you might have checked the Healthline article, seen that it actually cited a MEDRS source, and edited the citation to that, rather than simply destroying my contribution.WhichDoctor (talk) 18:19, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Can't agree with your ideas that a) "all effective drugs are in some way derived from sources that have use in traditional systems" - that is a false relationship. Traditional practitioners didn't (or don't) have a clue about the active substances in plants, or how to extract them specifically, so the few successful treatments would have been as trial-and-error successful as chewing on dirt; and b) Phytotherapy Research is not a WP:MEDRS source (no high-quality clinical research would be published there), and the low number of subjects (122) and inconsistent dosing cited in a low-quality meta-analysis does not convince or qualify as a good source per WP:BURDEN. We have two reliable overview sources for the article: NIH and Drugs.com, both of which conclude the study quality to date - as for 99%+ of all herbs in traditional or herbal medicine - is insufficient. If there was any truth of useful effect, there would be widespread clinical use and regulatory approval, which of course do not exist. Pertaining to BURDEN, it may be useful for you to read WP:WHYMEDRS and WP:MEDASSESS, which will reveal why medical editors for the encyclopedia have to adhere to the highest standard for sourcing. Zefr (talk) 19:09, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

@Zefr: If there was any truth of useful effect, there would be widespread clinical use and regulatory approval

No, there wouldn't. Listen to yourself—you're applying the Efficient-market hypothesis as if it were a law of nature, and to the pharmaceutical industry, no less.

Do you have any idea how the IND process works? The financial, legal, and personnel commitment it takes to get something approved as a drug? It can be a ten year, billion dollar endeavor. Who on Earth would go through that process for a spice, to arrive at a licensed and approved product that anyone can just buy in bulk at the grocery store for five dollars a pound?

Traditional practitioners didn't (or don't) have a clue about the active substances in plants, or how to extract them specifically

Two things:

1. You're flat wrong. See Bhang, also licorice root: one of the most common ingredients in TCM formulations, where its role is described as "harmonizing" the other ingredients in a brew. The sweet-tasting component in licorice root is called glycyrrhizin, and it has a very interesting property: it increases the water-solubility of a number of other compounds found in common TCM herbs. That is to say: many chemicals which can't be extracted in boiling water can be extracted in licorice tea. Please, read the article: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/cpb1958/36/9/36_9_3491/_article/-char/ja/ and keep it in mind when you see a study describing low water-solubility or bioavailability of an active compound.

2. You don't always need to extract a chemical from a plant in order for it to do something. A lot of times, you can just eat the plant.

Maybe you need to widen your definition of "widespread clinical use and regulatory approval". Start with the page sho-saiko-to, then click around. Not to edit, just to learn. Maybe read the literal translation of the term Chinese patent medicine, and sit with that for a minute. Ask yourself why sho-saiko-to doesn't have a drugs.com page.

Consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the people who've been "chewing on dirt" for 5,000 years know something you don't. WhichDoctor (talk) 20:48, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard#Fenugreek

Your thread has been archived

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CS1 error on Chaptalization

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