… and people say calculus is confusing … but at least we have a chance of understanding and solving something written in calculus …
read and re-read and re-read your post until my head hurt … which lead us back to …
cast iron skillet + wife + strike on head = knock out
even works in Brazil
It goes beyond that. Just because we know a substance is essential does not mean we know an effective method of replacement, or whether a proposed method is both safe and effective. The biochemistry may tell us one thing but theraputics requires many other separate functions.
If it has not undergone appropriate scientific study, it is never any more than a belief.
Vitamin therapies often require megadoses of materials known to be required at very low levels. The rational for megadoses is often the belief that they will travel to the sites of activity in adequate levels to be effective. Sometimes the site of activity is known, sometimes it is not.
The way of proving safety and effectiveness is well known, a well designed, controlled double-blind study, like drugs have to go through. A process which is cost prohibitive for many substances and is not attempted for most vitamins, minerals and supplements.
Human beings get their beliefs from a variety of sources, some more reliable than others. They can be right or wrong. They can be rational or irrational. But they are unproven.
Great medical breakthroughs have come from medicine men and shamans around the world, and they still have required scientific research to become accepted as other than belief.
There are many cures waiting to solve medical problems which humans face, if they could just solve how to make them pass the blood brain barrier or other obstacles which our bodies provide. What works in a test tube or a petri dish does not always work in our bodies.
You’re confusing:
ontology - what’s true
epistemology - how you know it is true
regulation - what the fda requires to sell something
population level therapeutics - what’s proven in random controlled trials (RCT’s)
subjective physiology - what works on you
You’re reducing all of that into a single, incorrect bucket.
Not double blind = belief
Patently false.
Gravity existed before Newton. Vitamin C cured scurvy before anyone knew it was Vitamin C. Potassium fixed arrhythmias before Pubmed existed.
Biochemistry precedes epistemology. Biochemistry informs therapeutics.
Human methods of validation does not equal truth. We discover it.
And this is all already proven. Vitamin B12 deficiency causes neuropathy 100% of the time long term. No RCT exists - it’s a biochemical fact that is measured.
The mechanism is well know and studied.
RCT’s were created in the 1900’s. human physiology has been around for billions of years.
Between melatonin and memecoins, the only scam here are the memecoins.
Speaking of which, I just took my melatonin for the evening. Hope I don’t kick the bucket, push up daisies, become plant fertilizer… whatever the metaphor of preference is.
You are confusing biology with medicine.
Contrary to your beliefs, creating theraputics requires skill which are different from those required to postulate science.
Yes vitamin deficiency causes many diseases. Vitamin deficiency is not always due to lack of intake of vitamins. Oral supplements may be not ineffective because they are not identical in the way they are absorbed in the same manner as the vitamins or minerals in food, and may not be of identical composition.
The mechanisms are known, whether an manufactured product is effective requires scientific proof. And there are reasons why some people are more likely than others to have vitamin deficiencies.
You want to leave out all of the process which determines whether vitamins and supplements are effective or safe because either you do not know what is required or perhaps refuse to spend the money which is required.
Many suppliers of vitamins and supplements have lawyers and not scientists, they seek to make claims up to the point when the FDA will take action. If one wants to make claims of effectiveness, your arguments fall short. There is a process to make more extensive claims, but it requires the use of experimental science and clinical trials.
The FDA was created, and its drug safety process was created after many children died due to an unsafe elixir of Sulfonamide was put on the market. Sulfonamide drugs saved hundred of thousand of live, as the first widely available antibiotics. Many children who could not take tablets or capsules died. An elixir which used an unsafe solvent caused deaths because the manufacturer Massengill used a chemist to create an elixir, and the chemist found a solvent which dissolved the drug and killed the patients.
I could supply vitamins or supplements which are bedpan bullets, and never dissolve and sell them in the US. It has been done before. And they would still get 4 or 5 star reviews online. They might be somewhat effective - the placebo effect is very strong.
You’re still blending distinct domains as if they’re interchangeable. They’re not. That’s the root error.
A. Biochemistry (What is)
Molecules like potassium, B12, Ferritin, IGF-1, cortisol, melatonin, etc. have fixed, known, mechanistic actions. They do not require belief, consensus, or an RCT to function.
Eg.
B12 deficiency leads to elevated MMA leads to impaired Methlmalonyl-coa mutase
Potassium deficiency leads to membrane polarization leads to arrhythmia
Iron deficiency leads to hemoglobin synthesis reduction leads to fatigue/hypoxia
These are not contested. They’re biochemical first principles.
B. Epistemology (How we Know)
Correcting a measured deficiency is not a ‘belief system’ - Deficiency leads to biomarker shift, the resolution of which is mechanistic causality, not faith. No one demands RCTs for fixing the above examples: B12 deficiency, iron deficiency, hypokalemia etc. These are not probabilistic questions; they’re constraint-based physiology.
C. Regulation (What FDA Requires)
FDA rules govern claims and marketing, not the laws of biology. Regulation is not the arbiter of truth, it is, in fact, an arbiter of liability.. Conflating FDA process with biochemical validity is a category error.
D. Therapeutics (Application)
Clinical practice is not limited to ‘what has an RCT.’ Medicine corrects deficiencies every day using biomarkers and mechanisms, not belief. If your standard were applied universally, 80% of conventional medicine would disappear.
Your assertion:
No RCT = belief
collapses four different domains into one.
So biochemistry is not validated by belief; Mechanisms are not contingent on regulation. Deficiencies are not treated via philosophy.
Gravity does not require peer review for the apple to fall. Citrus was used to treat scurvy before anyone knew what Vitamin C was etc. Biology precedes discovery. Discovery precedes regulation and none of it depends on what a person believes. That is the entire point.
You are not wrong about the dangers of the supplement market nor about FDA history or placebo effects…
But you are absolutely wrong for calling biochemistry ‘belief’, requiring RCTs for biochemical causation, equating regulation for scientific truth, confusing therapeutics with physiology and collapsing different categories into a single bucket - you’re arguing adjacent to my points.
If you can sell bedpan bullets in lieu of vitamins and get 4-5 stars, that speaks to consumer gullibility not biology.
OK you got me.
After I shut down my system last night I realized that you took an irrelevant response, probably generated by AI had it add a level of obfuscation and let me go at it.
My comments on the Vitamin and supplement industry were not a challenge to the existence of vitamin deficiency or vitamins as a treatment.
By obfuscating, you diverted attention from the abuse of vitamins by the industry to a challenge to the well proven by appropriate scientific techniques, of vitamin deficiency. Not only does the science support the role of vitamins, the risk of symptoms when there is a deficiency, it also defines the levels of each vitamin required to avoid deficiency.
The questionable products which appeal to believers, long time or newly converted by TV commercials or social mediam are easily identified, They are the products which provide vitamins in quantity well beyond their minimum daily requirements.
The role of vitamins in biochemistry is generally accepted to be as catalysts for chemical reactions. Catalysts, in small quantities, assist the successful of these reactions. Though their role as a catalyst is not proven, I am not aware of any alternative role which rivals it.
I am not calling out biochemistry, I am calling out chicanery. The vitamin levels in the bulk of the products in the aisles in the drug store and on Amazon are not justified by any science.
The truly important vitamin products offered are the multivitamins which make up for dietary insufficiency of vitamins. And they are not the bulk of the products being marketed by the industry. Their vague claims of wellness to avoid running afoul of FDA regulations are hypocritical, at best.
I suspect you may have used AI to help generate your posts, and add the obfuscation to the irrelevant facts which were not challenged. I should have recognized that immediately. My BAD.
nobody here disputed: existence of scams, label abuse, absurd dosing protocols that are sold by companies, regulatory gaps or the importance of medical trials - you brought all that up. It’s not super complicated:
biochemical truth ≠ fda structure ≠ consumer behavior
we’ve had the same discussion on policy and economics; you did the same thing there.
hard to do when it’s the natural sciences though.
glad we agree.
@Tried_Tested - Seriously though, are you using AI in these responses? Because I thought the same thing. LOL
Be honest…. 
not in creating them, but I have an entire thread on epistemology and ontology so there is/are a lot of transfer - I have separate threads on my health logs and pharmacology based on my patient history. I’ve said repeatedly that I use Ai heavily now - but you think pointing out that biochemistry is not epistemology requires ai? or when category soup slop is presented you need ai to point out the fault? and let’s say I copy pasted all my responses from ai, what changed?
I was just curious. Wasn’t coming at ya. Breathe….
I can’t; I have hypoxia and belief hasn’t kicked in hard enough for me to do anything about it 
So much words here. I can’t follow this, guess I didn’t get enough sleep.
BTW, has anyone checked on @Uncle_Leroy ?
Still alive. Still no life insurance payout for anyone.
This sounds like a poster at a conference, which often is not a completed study. They might be working on seeing what the feedback is in order to develop a study.