I don't have a lot of experience at making judgments about orders of magnitude, so you are probably right. But my estimate was based not only on the seeming untrustworthiness of the source, but also on an estimate of how likely it is that anything like what this guy is claiming is true. If you multiply together the probabilities that:
- literally all medical complaints, from autism to backache, have the same cause, which is deficiency of micronutrients available in ordinary foods if eaten in sufficient quantities;
- the extremely vigorous biological/medical sciences have been fundamentally totally off the mark for at least a century and that probably something like hundreds of thousands of seemingly well-verified scientific findings are wrong (how this could have happened, the guy doesn't say); and that
- of all people, this clown[1] was the person who figured it out ...
... I'm really not sure you get something much more likely than 1 in 10 million.
fn1. just an excuse to link to my favorite of his many hilarious comments (posted 8 1/2 hours after his previous announcement of a "breakthrough"):
Sweet another break through, was able to unify eastern and western medicine.
Riiiiiiiiight.
What are you trying to find by taking the product of these probabilities? They are not independent, so I think you meant to use probabilities that are conditional upon each other. For example, to find the probability of their conjunction, we would need%20=%20P(A)%20\times%20P(B%20\mid%20A)%20\times%20P(C\mid%20B%20\cap%20A))
instead. 10^-7 seems a bit low for this.
That quote is great. :D
In a different forum I frequent ( The Ornery American ), a regular member there (LetterRip) has recently been making an extraordinary claim - a new theory of medicine he has devised that relates and can contribute in the cure of several neurological-related conditions.
I understand that the prior probabilities for him being a crank are much much higher than him being a new Louis Pasteur. Still I was wondering if there is anyone here with sufficient medical/medicinal knowledge that they can easily determine if there's something obviously ludicrous in LetterRip's theory, or even the opposite: if indeed there's something there that makes sense and is worth investigating.
Here are some of the relevant threads he began:
- where he requests contacts
- where he publishes portion of his theory as a Kindle book
- where he announces more "breakthroughs" and insights and offers to cure or at least alleviate simple ailments
Once again: I understand it's highly unlikely there's anything in his theory; still, I felt a cost-benefit analysis justified my making this post here.
So... anyone with enough understanding of biology/medicine to evaluate these claims of his?