>how likely do you believe it is that you are better informed than a trained professional after a web search for side effects
How much "training" do you think doctors get with respect to the thousands of drugs that they may prescribe? Doctors are almost all specialists, and read the same side effects labels (or google them these days) that you do. You are not required to rely exclusively on your doctor's risk/benefit analysis for a given prescription. Furthermore, as the commenter pointed out in his example, often times doctors simply do not know what is causing a problem and will throw drugs at it - a lot of medicine is guesswork.
>Prednisone is on the WHO's list of essential medicines
Which says nothing about its side effect profile
>The fact that it can be dangerous when misused is not in any way evidence that it should never be used.
Drugs have side effects even when not misused.
>Put simply, your stance is anti-science. I hope that you will reconsider it. Whether or not you do, I hope that no one reading your comment puts any weight on your opinion, which is not grounded in fact or knowledge.
Not treating a doctor's word as gospel truth is hardly "anti-science" - on the contrary, blind faith is anti-science. And what is researching a drug's side effect profile if not grounding oneself in "fact or knowledge"?
Doctors make mistakes. Not proactively sanity checking their treatments is irresponsible when you have the same resources that they do.
There are multiple possible explanations. People sometimes get confused about which account they're posting from, which is not the same thing as intentionally using a sockpuppet. Alternatively, people in the same household sometimes both post to HN, and same-household would readily explain same-dog. Either way, it seems unlikely that there was any attempt to deceive here.
OP said: "there is almost no condition for which the right treatment is prednisone."
I said: "prednisone is on the WHO's list of essential medicines," which is very strong evidence that the claim is incorrect.
Your response obliquely claims that doctors do not get training on prescribing prednisone, by making reference to thousands of drugs that a doctor might prescribe. This is not an argument, it is an insinuation. You have no idea how much training doctors get, nor apparently are you aware that in 2019 prednisone was the 27th most prescribed drug in the United States [1]. It also has well known and possibly severe side effects. If, as you obliquely claim, doctors are not trained in its correct use, then it must also be the case that medical schools are astonishingly incompetent.
I will note at this point that I am referring to your oblique claim because I suspect it was intentionally stated vaguely so that you could attempt to slip out of any counterargument merely by saying that you meant something else.
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Stepping back: the belief espoused in this thread is nothing short of a conspiracy theory, and you are engaging in classic conspiratorial thinking in order to support it.
I encourage you, and anyone else reading this thread, to read "The Conspiracy Theory Handbook" by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook [2].
Let's go through the ways in which your argument maps directly to several of the hallmarks that are listed on pages 6 and 7 of the above pamphlet. I'm certain that if we continued this conversation (which I will not) we would see even more examples of such thinking.
- Contradictory: you believe that doctors are specialists, and yet you appear not to believe that the specialist doctors at the WHO who decide which drugs are essential are qualified to balance the benefits and the side effects.
- Overriding suspicion: if, as you claim, doctors throw drugs at problems with such frequency that one should almost never take a doctor's advice to take prednisone---in spite of the fact that it was prescribed nearly 23 million times in 2019---it must be the case that doctors are almost uniformly some heady mix of incompetent and malicious.
- Immune to evidence: your response to my argument makes clear that you are not interested in reconsidering your position on prednisone---your belief system is a closed epistemological loop. The WHO's listing prednisone as an essential drug makes not a dent on your claims about its side effects---never mind that it is completely outlandish and unreasonable to believe that a cost-benefit analysis would not be considered when selecting a drug "with due regard to disease prevalence and public health relevance, evidence of efficacy and safety and comparative cost-effectiveness" [3].
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I am not judging or insulting you. It is easy to fall into a pattern of beliefs that is not supported by facts, and to begin to identify with the beliefs themselves rather than the evidence that backs them up. I implore you, examine your beliefs and take seriously the possibility that you have fallen victim to conspiratorial thinking. The pamphlet I have linked above is a short and very worthwhile read, and I am confident that if you take its contents seriously you will gain valuable perspective.
How much "training" do you think doctors get with respect to the thousands of drugs that they may prescribe? Doctors are almost all specialists, and read the same side effects labels (or google them these days) that you do. You are not required to rely exclusively on your doctor's risk/benefit analysis for a given prescription. Furthermore, as the commenter pointed out in his example, often times doctors simply do not know what is causing a problem and will throw drugs at it - a lot of medicine is guesswork.
>Prednisone is on the WHO's list of essential medicines
Which says nothing about its side effect profile
>The fact that it can be dangerous when misused is not in any way evidence that it should never be used.
Drugs have side effects even when not misused.
>Put simply, your stance is anti-science. I hope that you will reconsider it. Whether or not you do, I hope that no one reading your comment puts any weight on your opinion, which is not grounded in fact or knowledge.
Not treating a doctor's word as gospel truth is hardly "anti-science" - on the contrary, blind faith is anti-science. And what is researching a drug's side effect profile if not grounding oneself in "fact or knowledge"?
Doctors make mistakes. Not proactively sanity checking their treatments is irresponsible when you have the same resources that they do.