Talk:Policosanol

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Alternative medicine

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Policosanol.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

Citeneeded tag on affiliation of authors of positive studies[edit]

I put a citeneeded tag on the part of the article which states that many of the positive papers are tied to a sugar-cane pushing group. I don't dispute the statement, but it would be nice to see refs to positive articles from that group, and some evidence for their connection with sugar-cane production. --Slashme 09:25, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV NEEDED[edit]

This piece is tainted by both believers and skeptics. Someone "above the fray" needs to take a strong hand in cleaning this up, eliminating the many unsupported assertions on either side. If I were to do it there wouldn't be enough left to make an article. 19:29, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

References[edit]

The article is indeed a mess, also the citations are largely nonsense if you actually check them. Several are all published by the same group, and one of the ones cited as being in support of the drug working actually says that it doesn't. I'll work my way through it all later if I can be bothered. Certainly only the Cuban studies show that it works. Regardless of where their funding comes from (I'll look into it), it's not good practise to claim a drug works based on studies from only one research team, especially when as far as I can tell the only external studies conducted on it found no evidence that it worked. Layscience (talk) 23:33, 11 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

References Removed[edit]

I have removed the 9 "supporting" references that were added. Seven of them were associated with the drug's producer, and of the remaining two one was a meta-study of various drugs that simply commented on this work, and the other explicitly stated that Policosanol had no clinical effect.

If someone can find an independent trial not associated with the Cuban government (which manufactures and markets the drug), that genuinely supports Policosanol having a clinical effect, feel free to add it. Layscience (talk) 16:56, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

REVERTED 30th MAY EDIT BY 70.190.28.249[edit]

There is no political bias in this entry, which is a fair and accurate assessment of the current state of medical research on the drug. The fact is that while the government-owned manufacturer of the drug has made various claims that it can reduce cholesterol, independent studies and meta-studies have either been inconclusive, or shown that this is not the case. If you think you have an independent study that demonstrates the efficacy of the drug in reducing cholesterol in humans, then please discuss it here before making sloppy edits.

Question for everyone[edit]

I currently suffer from High Cholesterol. I cannot take statin drugs due to the fact I'm one of those 1 in 1,000 that have adverse effects (constant leg pain). I was researching this drug and came upon this wiki. But I also have found a link on another website, that gives results of studies that show remarkable results, I cannot locate in the article or on the website if the studies were done in the U.S. or somewhere else in the world. Here is a link to the website: altmedangel.com/statnalt.htm Does anyone have any proof there has been no other studies done anywhere else other than Cuba? Getsome4u (talk) 04:22, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Getsome4u[reply]

That website describes multiple studies, claims remarkable results, but nowhere identifies any of its sources. The home page states, "Doctors have lost hospital privileges because they recommended or sold vitamins. Hundreds of products have been confiscated and removed from the market 'pending drug approval' not because they were dangerous but because they worked too well.... Since I am not a doctor, I cannot be persecuted or black-listed." This is not the tone of a reliable source. Bustter (talk) 04:32, 3 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]