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Originally Posted by ASU2003
I criticize the science because their methods are flawed and they went looking for a certain result and stopped the study early when they got it.
I'll read the stupid study again, but it won't change anything. There should be other people who make sure scientists are actually doing science and not statistics.
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Your assumptions are incorrect. Institutional Review Boards and the peer review process are set up to make sure scientists are actually doing science (statistics are a vital part of science).
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Why would they offer to circumcise the control group before they even started if they were impartial and trying to determine if circumcision had any effects or not. It sounds like they expected a result from the start to me.
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How would offering to circumcise the control group affect anything? They circumcised them after the study was finished.
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And how much sex will a newly circumcised guy have in the three months following the surgery?
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I don't know. How long does it take a circumcision to heal?
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So, they didn't want to give it another 9 months (which is still too short of a time in my opinion) to see the numbers get closer together...
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You keep saying that the numbers would have gotten closer, but I suspect you have absolutely no reason- beyond your own personal expectations- to suspect that they would get closer. Why do your expectations have more credibility than the folks involved with this study?
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But it looks like they actually did collect the data. It's just that 60% after one year sounds better than 38% after 2 years. Is it going to be 20% after 3 years? It should hold true year after year if they want to make a claim.
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You're confusing risk ratios (RR) with protection. Protection = 1-RR, so that the protective effect was actually greater as time progressed (62%).
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I was a little mistaken above, they did collect behavior data in this study. Yet I'm still not convinced that one group didn't by chance happen to sleep with more HIV infected people.
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I don't think you could be convinced. You seem too hopelessly committed to your own expert opinion. One group probably did get more exposed to HIV, but which one? The size of the group should ensure that any difference was insignificant.
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So, do they know how many times each person in each group slept with an infected individual?
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Probably not. Just like trials involving the efficacy of flu vaccines can't take into account how frequently participants were exposed to the flu. The random nature of the study design should reduce the effect of this type of bias.
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(Their graph says it is 7 vs 15 after 12 months. They need to check to make sure things correspond to one another. I also like how it is 2 vs 9 after 3 months (when the circumcised group wasn't supposed to or couldn't have sex for 6 weeks...) At the end they wrote it off as an insignificant amount of time during the 21 month trial, yet it's like starting a baseball game already down. It was only a 5 vs 6 infection rate for the next 9 months.)
And there are a bunch of other numbers thrown around like 72/74 were HIV positive at the beginning (how many others had recently contracted it, but the HIV test missed it), and there were uncircumcised men in the intervention group, and circumcised men in the control group at about a 8% level for some reason.
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These are perhaps valid complaints. I don't care to refute them. That's why this study has been done multiple times. Each time, a similar result was seen.
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They are spreading false beliefs that all they need to do is get circumcised and they can fuck anyone and stay disease free.
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You're delusional if you think that this is what "they" are "spreading". Seriously. You should stop and think about why you really have such a big problem with these studies. Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with the vagaries of scientific inquiry.