This study this meme is based on is completely incorrect and should be retracted. Here’s a lay summary of its issues:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/03/04/new-paper-debunks-the-prevalence-of-women-hunting-in-early-societies/

And the published article detailing the problems with that study’s issues:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000497

Sorry, what? Not sure if you’re joking, but Americans use texts because they’re free and the ability to use them comes preloaded on the phone (no need to download something that takes up more space). I have Signal and WhatsApp on my phone for my international friends, but I use texts to communicate with US friends because RCS works with everyone and it’s integrated much better into my phone, watch, etc. than any app can be without an absurd amount of permissions given to the app.

Interesting take! Is lightning conscious, then? The idea of Thor isn’t too far off if so, haha.

Not everyone finds it persuasive, yeah. It’s an appeal to intuition that many people, though not all, have.

Sorry, but this makes clear that you aren’t in science. You should avoid trying to shit on studies if you don’t know how to interpret them. Both of the things you mentioned actually support the existence of a true effect.

First, if the treatment has an effect, you would expect a greater rate of relapse after the treatment is removed, provided that it treats a more final pathway rather than the cause: People in the placebo group have already been relapsing at the typical rate, and people receiving treatment–whose disease has been ramping up behind the dam of a medication preventing it from showing–are then expected to relapse at a higher rate after treatment is removed. The second sixth-month period was after cessation of the curcumin or place; it was a follow-up for treatment-as-usual.

Second, people drop out of a study nonrandomly for two main reasons: side effects and perceived lack of treatment efficacy. The placebo doesn’t have side effects, so when you have a greater rate of dropout in your placebo group, that implies the perceived treatment efficacy was lower. In other words, the worst placebo participants are likely the extra dropouts in that group, and including them would not only provide more degrees of freedom, it would theoretically strengthen the effect.

This is basic clinical trials research knowledge.

Again, I have no skin in the game here. I don’t take curcumin, nor would I ever. I do care about accurate depictions of research. I’m a STEM professor at an R1 with three active federal grants funding my research. The meme is inaccurate.

Why are you completely ignoring the second paper I linked, which doesn’t suffer from any of the limitations you mentioned?

The meme says no trial was successful. Any trial with any small difference is a successful trial.

I’m not saying the study is good, just that the meme isn’t true.

Also, you can level almost every single one of those criticisms against many studies for SSRIs and they’d hit just as hard. The exception being sample size.

Not true:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714003620

https://www.cghjournal.org/article/S1542-3565(06)00800-7/fulltext

I found more, too.

Edit: I have no skin in this game. I don’t take turmeric and won’t ever because of the risk of lead. I’m just pointing out that the meme is inaccurate. The person who replied to me pointed out some flaws in the first study (not the second), but none of the flaws mentioned makes the meme accurate. Even the shitty first study I linked found a significant condition difference in its primary endpoint at 8 weeks. Yeah, it’s got flaws (which the second doesn’t), but a successful trial with heavy limitations and conflicts of interest is nonetheless a successful trial, making this meme inaccurate. The second study I linked is stronger.

Also, the limitations in the first trial are standard for many clinical trials. For example:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsr.12201

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X14001266

I could list 100 more with the same limitations of the first study I linked above. High dropout, small sample sizes, funding by an industry with a conflict of interest etc. are standard for clinical trial studies.