Sorry I was unclear in my question. The question is about regimens and treatments in general, not just probiotics. The variance of responses around the mean is obviously bigger than zero. The bigger it is, the less relevant are “generally accepted practices.” For some treatments, the effect on say 60% of the population could be positive (to various degrees), the effect on 20% could be zero, and the effect on 20% could be negative. Obviously this variance is different for different treatments. I was just wondering how to think about this phenomenon and its implications.

Chandra’s research was not in “an obscure area”. One thing he studied was how old people can avoid memory loss. His work on that topic was covered in the New York Times — taken completely seriously by the Times. Another area in which Chandra worked was what to feed babies. His work was taken entirely seriously by Nestle executives and many other people. His anti-breast-milk (fabricated) results may have harmed thousands if not millions of babies. Every dollar he got in grant money — and he got millions — harmed the scientists who therefore failed to get that money. By “>99% of the world believed Chandra” I didn’t mean  >99% of the world had heard of him. (I wish.) I meant >99% of those who encountered his work believed it.

I don’t remember saying he got away with it because he worked in an area where no one bothered to check. People did check — and got different results. The politics of science is why he got away with it — the price of pointing it out was too high. It was because his work wasn’t obscure that he got caught: It reached the notice of two people — Saul and me — who were outside his sphere of influence.

Yeah, fury at holocaust deniers surely has something to do with revenge, as you say. (The more polite term for revenge is justice.) You want the killers to be named as killers; anything that gets in the way of that is infuriating. Fine. Human nature, I agree. But genocide has a large revenge component as well, as Amy Chua has shown in World on Fire. That’s my point: You become what you say you are against.

In contrast, genocide remains a live issue, and a big rhetorical strategy of mass murderers is to deny that they’ve done it, or to claim that they’ve done it in self-defense. So fighting false historical revisionism is a good thing to do, I’d say. And, of course people get “really really upset” by Holocaust deniers: to have your relatives killed, and then have people trying to get their killers off the hook, yes, that’s horrible.

Regarding the HIV/Aids thing: Duesberg’s writings give me the impression that he enjoys pissing people off. I’m not surprised that, yes, he succeeds at this task. I don’t think that people responding, perhaps intemperately, to a provocation is comparable to the flinging of racial slurs at people who are just minding their own business.

Dennis Mangan, A case report of niacin in the treatment of restless legs syndrome, Medical Hypotheses, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 30 June 2009, ISSN 0306-9877, DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2009.05.048.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WN2-4WN1YJS-1/2/5492c7af920b9b39946d3166687ebce5)

It’s not my use of “scientific” I’m talking about; it’s how AIDSTruth.org uses it. They plainly use it as a way of placing themselves above other people, the way a thousand derogatory terms are used. It doesn’t fit the definition of “derogatory”, of course, but it is used to the same effect.

There’s a difference between people who intentionally deceive, and people who are trying to do honest investigation into (in this case) an historical event. Some of them are intentionally misleading, and in that case, it’s probably warranted to get upset by what they’re doing. Some are not - they believe rather they *they* are being misled (and they believe that this explains why people aren’t allowed to investigate it freely, are imprisoned for questioning the official narrative, and so on).

I also don’t think the word “scientific” is really comparable to the so-called N-word (or even to the much milder F-word). But maybe you use the word “scientific” in a different way than other people do!

Specific applications always introduce variance. Although Vitamin C cures all scurvy, some fruits may have less Vitamin C than others, etc.