Yeah, I haven't watched it, but I did pull up the youtube channel and browsed the linked Pubmed searches.Atelo wrote:Nah, that channel is one of my subscriptions, he does other interesting videos. Besides, I didn't watch the whole vid, he quotes a lot of scientific papers that get pretty boring, but I thought Croakker would be interested.
The strongest studies are the published ones in the British Medical Journal linking cannabis to schizophrenia. The other studies he draws upon are from far less credible journals. I'm very interested to watch and see what he says about the studies. I'm even more curious about his medical background to see how he's analyzing the data he's quoting, as the previous one had him quoting data that was clearly shown on the screen to be not significant, while ignoring other data that was statistically significant.
One problem with many of the studies in his search, is that the sample size is really low, as in only 300 or so. The power of a study relates to the number of samples versus the percentage of the condition studied. If you have a disease that affects 1 in 5 people, 300 could show enough affected people to make the outcome of the study relevant. But, the lower the odds of a disease/condition being prevalent, the more samples needed in the study to have enough power to adequately measure the hypothesis. Think about how prevalent heart disease is. The studies looking at the impact of smoking, or cholesterol, or outcomes of exercise have huge numbers to support them, in the tens of thousands of patients per arm studied. Small samples sizes like in the studies he's finding really limit the ability of statistics to tease out true differences between groups of patients.
Now, I think the legalization of 'medical' marijuana in California, Colorado, and the rest provides a huge potential database of patients to compare to the non-using population. Colorado had 100k prescriptions in 2009. That's a fantastic pool of patients to follow over a few years and look at the incidence of deleterious effects.
So, Kilt could actually be doing his part for advancing medical knowledge!