How I decided not to take something after reading about it

Nothing in this circle is medical advice and none of us is in a position to tell you what is safe for you.

The interaction question is almost entirely unstudied for most of this, and that is worth stating on every thread.

Nothing to add except that I am glad this thread exists.

Something I got wrong was assuming that because something is discussed everywhere it must have a body of evidence behind it.

My reading of the published record on most of these is that it is early, small and mostly not in people.

What helped me was reading one full paper rather than twenty summaries, because the summaries had all lost the same caveats.

Something practical: I keep a note of what I have actually read on each of these, because otherwise I mistake familiarity for knowledge.

Same here, and I am glad you said it first.

This is where the evidence thins out and I would rather this circle said so plainly than pretended otherwise.

Well said, and thank you for taking the time over it.

What I keep coming back to is that a compound having a plausible mechanism and a compound having human outcome data are very different situations.

What Tacita described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

I would say be very careful with anything where the entire published record is animal work. That is a starting point, not a finding.

The honest answer to most questions in this circle is that nobody has run the study that would answer them.

What helped me was asking, for each compound, what the best single piece of human evidence actually is. Often the answer is very little.

Something I have noticed is that the confidence of the discussion is usually inversely proportional to the amount of evidence.

I found the discussion here refreshingly free of certainty, which is not true of anywhere else I have looked.

Everything discussed here is research-use-only material. That is not a formality: it was never manufactured, released or documented for use in a person.

Reading Fabian, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

My position is that I read about these with interest and I do not take them, and I want that to be a legitimate position in this circle.

The reading group format works well for this. We took one compound, found everything published, and concluded it was thinner than the discussion suggested.