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Science

Study Validates Benefits of 'Lorenzo's Oil' 21

Posted by timothy from the regular-oil-changes dept.
Torvek writes "New Scientist has an article that discusses the medicinal oil from the Lorenzo movie. Apparently it's been proved to actually prevent the onset of symptoms when taken early enough."
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Study Validates Benefits of 'Lorenzo's Oil' More

Study Validates Benefits of 'Lorenzo's Oil'

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  • That movie was excellent , Lorenzo's oil. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zeio ( 325157 ) on Monday September 30, 2002 @02:36PM (#4361468)
    Lorenzo's oil was about a father whose son contracts a debilitating degenerative disease. (Potential spoiler in this synopsis, if you trust this movie is good, do not read further, go rent it now.) The disease is one that degenerates the myelin sheathing on the nerves in the body. The father is deeply trouble by his son's increasing inability to function at the most basic levels and in a race against time he basically becomes a doctor. This, from what I can remember, is a true story. Anyways, after studying like crazy, and studying everything known about his son's diseases, he comes up with an idea that a long hydrocarbon [I believe the length was 26 e.g. CH3-(CH2)24-CH3), but with lots of other functional groups here and there.] oil is somehow going to protect the myelin from further denigration. He finds a natural substance that is similar to the protected oil he theorized about, and apparently it works and stops the never degenerations. Sadly, it is too late for his son, as it only stops the damage, but does not restore it. The movie ends kind of somberly, but inspiring, as the father helped many others with his incessant and furious research in a mad dash to save his son. Anyways, it was a moving movie, and quite well done and an inspiration to us all.
    • as an aside, the oil was distilled by Croda in Hull, UK (my home city), London as was claimed in the film.
    • It's a decent movie, but be forwarned that it's still a hollywood movie and they try to make scientists into the bad guy. From what I understand most of the bad guy scientist stuff was manufactured by Hollywood to make a better script. This pisses me off because many people get their impressions of the world from movies more than anyone cares to admit. Beyond that, you have to get past Nick Nolte's Italian accent, which is pretty funny. The story is pretty amazing though, since the father has no training in science, and still manages to have a major insite after self-educating himself about molecular biology and this disease. In terms of people becoming more involved in medicine, and not just passive participants it's a great story.
    • Phil Collins even has a song [amazon.com] about Lorenzo (Lyrics by Lorenzo's mother, I think). It's on the "Dance into the Light" album.

  • Reasons not to believe (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Peter T Ermit ( 577444 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2002 @07:57AM (#4366151)
    1) The study doesn't appear to have been blinded.

    2) The study is performed by the guy who has the most to lose if it fails. Unavoidable sometimes, but it makes a study less credible.

    3) It looks like he's already had some failed trials with people who've shown an onset of symptoms. This affects the probability of having a false positive effect in your corpus of research -- a false positive that is sure to get headlines.

    4) Reading between the lines, it seems that their protocol was poor. "By the end of the study 76 per cent of the 68 boys getting the oil were still healthy and producing normal brain MRI scans. The same was true of no more than about one in three of the 36 boys who did not regularly get the oil."

    This sounds like everyone got the oil at the outset. 66% of those who stopped taking the oil had degeneration while 24% of those who continued did. But, of course, parents are much more likely to stop giving their children oil if they think it's not working, so the placebo group will be artificially enriched with failures and the oil group will be artificially enriched with successes. But I can't say for sure because...

    5) The study hasn't been peer-reviewed or even published.

    • Peer review is not a guarantee of quality, since humans make mistakes and plenty of good research is often rejected by 'peers' who don't like the point of view as it may interfere with their own plans for domination of a field. As always it pays to be skeptical but openminded at the same time.
      • It's true that peer review doesn't guarantee quality anymore than a score>=1 filter guarantees that you'll only see coherent, intelligent, and articulate posts on Slashdot. That being said, though, I'll wait until Mr. Lorenzo's Oil gets modded up a few points by his peers before I take him too seriously.
        • But if it was your son/daughter that had the disease, I'm sure you wouldn't hesitate to buy snake^H^H^H^H^HLorenzo's oil, even based only on anecdotical evidence. And in this case you would base your purchase not only on anecdotical evidence, but statistical evidence too.

          The problem with such wonder-drugs nobody understands, is that it after a while becomes very difficult to find a group not taking the drug, so you can know it's effects. And thus, you may never find out why it works.

          • I hope I'm never in that situation, and I don't really know for sure what I would do... but I'm fairly certain I *wouldn't* go out and buy Lorenzo's oil with this sort of information. I'd almost certainly try to get my hands on more information -- I'd ask for his papers and I'd write for his unpublished data. Then I'd make a judgment. However, I think I wouldn't base my conclusions on anecdotal evidence. Hopefully, I'll never have to test this theory.

            As for wonder-drugs, I don't know of very many that are so ubiquitous that you can't do a good trial. People can still do trials with aspirin, after all. The real problem comes when you have an effective drug and want to test it against a new drug. Researchers have to ask themselves when it is ethical to have a placebo trial and deny a patient a reasonably effective medication in hopes of finding a better one.

    • 6)Doesn't look like the groups were randomised.

      7)Unless they gave the second group some kind of substitute oil, there was no placebo group.

      Dave.
  • Why do people continue to post stories from the New Scientist? Just because the word "Scientist" appears in the title, doesn't mean this publication has anything to do with science. Check out other posted stories which originated in the New Scientist and you might just begin to suspect a trend.
    • Actually, I've read the New Scientist for some time, and IMHO it's one of the best science magazines out there. I prefer it to Popular Science, Discover, Scientific American, etc. The articles are generally more thorough, more techincal (but not prohibitively so), more interesting, and less sensationalist than most other publications.

      Just my 2 cents.
  • You know, I really found this to be a sad movie, because there was one point in it that struck too true:

    It doesn't matter how awful and crippling your disease is. If there aren't enough of you to make money off of, then it isn't worth our time to try and cure you.

    Sincerely, The Big Drug Companies

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