Helminthophile

January 2018

Thank you for your contributions. Please mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Helminthic therapy, as "minor" only if they are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. sciencewatcher (talk) 18:23, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, sciencewatcher! I wasn't aware of this definition of "minor". This is very helpful to know. Helminthophile (talk) 18:45, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Helminthic therapy page section: Anecdotal evidence

Regarding your removal of a section of this page on 25 March 2018, which you claim is based on "unreliable sources". This section draws attention to data gathered from helminth self-treaters and their physicians, which was presented in two socio-medical studies and suggests that a much larger number of diseases may be amenable to helminthic therapy than are currently being investigated by formal clinical trials. This is extremely important information for anyone who is interested in using this therapy, and you shouldn't be misled by the title, "Anecdotal evidence". This evidence was gathered by respected researchers using the most stringent methods available to them and reported in the two papers cited. You weren't to know this, since you're approaching this from the point of view of someone who is just trying to keep the facts in Wikipedia in line with your interpretation of the site's recommendations, but you can't get a more reliable source on helminthic therapy than Prof William Parker's team at Duke University. These guys are at the forefront of research on this therapy and have produced nineteen papers on it in the last 7 years! I therefore request that you roll back your edit. Helminthophile (talk) 19:50, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

The amount of research a team has published on a subject is not an indication of its quality. Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) has pretty high standards for claims of the type "this treatment might cure this disease". It generally prefers to see the outcome of random controlled clinical trials; if such trials have not happened, it would prefer to remain silent until they have. In fact there have been a number of clinical trials of helminthic therapy for various conditions, and some of them have produced negative results. (I think the article may be a bit out of date on that point, which is how I ended up there.) The sources cited for the section I removed are exactly the kind of sources this guideline is meant to exclude, and though they may have been the most "stringent" methods this team could afford (clinical trials are very expensive), they are certainly not reliable. In a practical sense, pretty much any study of any treatment for any disease that relies on self-reporting like this will potentially produce positive results (every treatment cures every disease) because of the placebo effect, confirmation bias, inaccurate memories, reporting inaccuracies, and other problems. Sometimes other researchers are inspired by this type of study to investigate correlations, either with basic research that attempts to determine a physical mechanism by which the treatment might be working, or by randomized trials that determine if the treatment is working even if we don't know how. Wikipedia generally avoids wading into these questions; we wait for a scientific consensus to form and wait for published reports of that. That's why the guideline generally excludes primary sources like this one, that represent reports which the larger scientific community may or may not agree with after it has a chance to do peer review and either dismiss the claims out of hand, or perhaps do further studies attempting to prove or disprove the same claims. Good news is, there seems to be lots of active research in this area, so we should be able to add more reliable information now and as more reports come in. -- Beland (talk) 21:07, 27 March 2018 (UTC)