74124, understand that I am not a chelation advocate or debunker; I don't know about it. Two guys I play bluegrass with say it's bogus and they're both MDs. I'll stick with them, because I've known them both for fifteen years, and they seem to make sense. But that's just me.

However, testimonials come in all flavors. For everyone who says a therapy is great, ther's another one who says it's worthless. But what's really worthless are the testimonials themselves, and here's why.

If I take the XYZ pill and I get healthy, I can say that "XYZ cured me" and it won't have any statistical significance at all, because the person reading the testimonial won't have a clue as to whether there was a CAUSAL rather than CASUAL relationship beteen the XYZ pill and getting better.

Maybe the person also stopped shooting meth, or changed her diet or just had a spontaneous cure. How could we tell what really WAS the cause of the cure, based on ANY testimonial? We can't.

But a double-blind study, on the other hand -- especially if it's done with a large population and is repeated -- will eliminate any guesswork. For example, if

* A thousand people take part in the test and half of them take the xyz pill and the other half take a placebo (something which looks like xyz but isn't); and if

* Neither the testers nor the subjects know which one they took until after the test is complete; and if

* Ten percent of the people taking the placebo get better and 48 pecent of the people taking the XYZ pill get better; then

* We KNOW that the XYZ pill works (at least some of the time).

That's the only way I can think of to systematically test whether a drug or a procedure works.

And so far, there haven't been any double-blind studies of chelation therapies that I know of.

You gotta ask yourself why all the people who are practicing chelation therapies haven't gone ahead and done these tests themselves!