Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story

(it's actually more complicated - I posted a shorter version, later corrected it with a longer version based on the account of one of the doctors involved but said it basically supported my shorter version, he also found the longer version and was about to publish an article saying he had debunked my shorter version, then noticed I had seen the same article and thought it supported me, and he thinks I was wrong to believe this)

This is headshakingly dense. As a hit on the FDA, his post wasn't right at all — not its basic structure and not anything else about it. He even admits that although Gura criticizes plenty of other actors, the FDA isn't one of them...I have no idea how you can write "they usually carry out their mandate well" in one place and then, in your main post, just go ahead and repeat your original belief—backed by an example you know is wrong—that the FDA does stupid and destructive things on practically a daily basis. This is why I'm automatically skeptical of anything on the web that's excessively critical of the FDA.

Let's go over the exact phrasing I used (at this point I admit I'm more in defending-myself mode than making-an-important-point-about-the-FDA mode). An early version of the post included a false claim that the fish oil helped the nervous system; I later edited it to a correct claim that fish oil helped the liver. Drum quotes the corrected version where I talk about the liver, so I'll use that here. I wrote:

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