alinus - fair point, i have gone back and edited it a bit to make it a bit less antagonistic. like fergus i find it is getting boring as there is only a certain amount of times you can explain the evidence to someone before it gets tedious. in this case what is most interesting to me is how and why people construct and hold onto strange beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence.
if you read 'Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time' by Michael Shermer it goes into detail about some of these reasons and it is very interesting. research shows that highly intelligent people such as university professors are just as likely to have weird beliefs as anyone else but are less likely to be able to be convinced of it because they are more skilled at coming up with ways to defend their position. Ebringers 'popper sequences' are a classic example of this. one of the most extreme examples is harvard medical school psychiatry professor and Pulitzer prize winner John Mack. later on in his career he went off the deep end and started writing books on alien abductions. to defend his arguments he would make claims such as "If the abduction phenomenon, as I suspect, manifests itself in our physical space/time world but is not of it in a literal sense, our notions of accuracy of recall regarding what did or did not 'happen' may not apply, at least not in the literal physical sense."
"I am not in this book seeking to establish the material reality of the alien abduction phenomenon. . . rather, I am more concerned with the meaning of these experiences for the so called abductees and for humankind more generally." - John Mack, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters
"In science, we are trying to get closer to the truth but in medicine, the results of our investigations should help the patient." - Alan Ebringer, Rheumatoid arthritis is caused by Proteus : the molecular mimicry theory and Karl Popper
i agree with Ebringer's philosophy about focussing on helping the patient, just not at the expense of sacrificing reality. to me these psychological aspects are the most interesting part of the discussion but if people are more interested in just the physical evidence then i'll try and keep that side of it to a minimum.
fergus - whether NSD only works for Kp+ patients has never been studied as NSD has never been studied. it is quite possible that microbiome composition affects the response to starch restriction but it is unlikely to have anything to do specifically with klebsiella.
