Lice are small insects, but with a dissecting microscope things like gut or heart movement are pretty easy to see on living lice. In this paper, Hukelbach and his colleagues were interested in how many louse treatments resulted in false positives.Ī lot of this research involves sitting over a dissecting microscope. For example, many researchers merely counted nonmoving lice as dead but few if any monitored the lice for recovery. al used a really, really strict definition of ‘dead’ which basically throws the kitchen sink at the problem.:Ī lot of head louse research uses similar definitions of ‘dead’, but much of this research simply isn’t very stringent when it comes to counting whether lice are deceased. We don’t have mini- EEG machines for lice, Hukelbach et. However, during their literature review (basically what I did in my last post), they ran into a problem with how to judge whether lice were dead. They took a random assortment of products and set out to experimentally determine whether they cause mortality. al did something similar to what I did in my other post. So one of the biggest problems in this sort of research is really determining whether the lice are dead or not. This means that the heartbeat is much less important to their physiology than it is to ours. CO2 is eliminated directly through the cuticle. Insects transport oxygen directly to tissues via a series of hollow tubes or direct diffusion in smaller insects. Insects, especially small insects, have a completely different way of breathing than humans. This, however, is not the case for insects. Thus, if there’s no measureable brain activity and if our heart’s not beating then it’s a pretty safe bet that we’re dead (most of the time). We have EEG machines to measure brain activity, and the fact that our blood is our main oxygen carrier requires our heart be constantly beating for us to stay alive. With this sort of research, one of the potential false positives is demonstrating whether an insect is really dead. Additionally, I will discuss the possibility for false positives in this sort of research. The commenters seemed interested in a discussion of what proving the efficacy of this treatment would involve, and I’m only happy to oblige. I’ve got no problem admitting there was information which I wasn’t aware of, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t look at new information when it arises to see if there’s any reason for me to correct my stance. There was a lot of good discussion, and commenters seemed sincere to me. Unfortunately it seems I missed an internal technical report from Licefreee which was kindly pointed out to me in the comments on Do OTC Head Louse Treatments Work? Part 2. (You can find exactly how I conducted my search for evidence here.) Many manufacturers have internally run tests on their websites, and I discussed these in as much detail as I could. ![]() These products are apparently marketed under a loophole that exempts homeopathic medications from clinical trials required for FDA approval for other medications.įor many of the treatments sold in stores, there is nothing in terms of product names or active ingredients in scientific literature. Two treatments which I discussed in detail, Quit Nits and Licefreee had not undergone FDA clinical trials and weren’t approved by the FDA. Male human head louse by Gilles San Martin via Flickr.Ī few months back, I did a series of posts in which I looked at what the available scientific literature had to say about head louse treatments. A response to commenters on head lice treatments
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |