User talk:Oceanlike

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Again, welcome! JFW &#124; T@lk  15:30, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Atorvastatin
I have temporarily removed your additions to atorvastatin because I don't think they are neutral. In particular the section on memory issues is biased towards the view. With regards to the diabetes link, it bears pointing out that the association (though real) is small and that it is a class-effect of potent statins. JFW &#124; T@lk  15:30, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

The effects were scientifically accurate and documented. The FDA released an official warning about them. Many of the effects already listed, good or bad, were class effects. The risk for diabetes is a serious one, and not that small. Dementia as well, they should be noted. I can change the wording if you'd like, but all proven effects should be listed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oceanlike (talk • contribs) 23:01, 12 April 2015(UTC)

SPA / COI
Hi Oceanlike all your edits to date have been about statins and emphasize negative effects. This makes your account what we call a "single purpose account" (please see WP:SPA) I'm giving you notice of our Conflict of Interest guideline and Terms of Use, and will have some questions for you below.

Hello, Oceanlike. We welcome your contributions to Wikipedia, but if you are affiliated with some of the people, places or things you have written about on Wikipedia, you may have a conflict of interest or close connection to the subject.

All editors are required to comply with Wikipedia's neutral point of view content policy. People who are very close to a subject often have a distorted view of it, which may cause them to inadvertently edit in ways that make the article either too flattering or too disparaging. People with a close connection to a subject are not absolutely prohibited from editing about that subject, but they need to be especially careful about ensuring their edits are verified by reliable sources and writing with as little bias as possible.

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 * Avoid or exercise great caution when editing or creating articles related to you, your organization, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with.
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Please familiarize yourself with relevant content policies and guidelines, especially those pertaining to neutral point of view, verifiability of information, and autobiographies. Note that Wikipedia's terms of use require disclosure of your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation.

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Question
Wikipedia is a scholarly project, and like all scholarly endeavors, disclosure of conflict of interest is essential for ensuring the integrity of Wikipedia and retaining the public's trust in it.

Would you please help the community understand your interest in side effects of statins? You could (for example) be involved in litigation, work for a company bringing competing drugs to market, or had experienced side effects yourself. I'm not asking for any personal information- just asking about the big picture. Thanks. (I'm watching your Talk page, so you can just answer here... thanks) Jytdog (talk) 01:47, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, my grandfather rapidly developed diabetes, Alzheimer's, and myopathy after taking Lipitor as a primary drug for many years. Since the brain is so heavily dependent on cholesterol, atorvastatin would be the prime suspect in his brain damage. All evidence is pointing to this, and many people have the same accounts. The FDA even put out a warning on memory loss problems. There is no reason for this risk not to be listed, as it is scientifically sound. Neurosteroids are also made from cholesterol. At the very least it should be noted as a potential or reported effect, it is helpful to consider. Oceanlike (talk) 23:41, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi thanks very much for replying, and I appreciate your patience with my questions and your gracious in answering. I am sorry about your grandfather - that must be (have been?) a very hard thing to live through.  i thought you might have experienced something like that.
 * can we talk a bit about how wikipedia works? Jytdog (talk) 00:53, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Okay Oceanlike (talk) 06:24, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Great, thanks very much! So let me say a bit, and then I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.  This is kind of long, and i hope you can take a few minutes to read this and think about it. I'm happy to hear what you have to say about it.


 * The mission of WP is to create an encyclopedia containing all human knowledge via "the crowd" - we are "the encyclopedia that any one can edit.". .... That is pretty crazily ambitious, right?  The only way the project has been able to survive all these years, is that the community has put in place a bunch of policies and guidelines  - through discussions over many years - that govern both content and behavior, and that provide a kind of "rule of law" here.  This is not the wild west or some "Mad Max" world.  I noticed that in your first edit you provided sources, so you already understand two of our key content policies, no original research and verifiability.   So you are already well on the path to really understanding this place, which is great.


 * The third key content policy is "neutral point of view" (NPOV) and this one, is the cause of a lot of discussion on article talk pages.  Following it well, is also  essential for providing the public with  reliable information.  What NPOV comes down to, is two things really - first, we use neutral, scholarly/professional language (no excessive hype or denigration), and -- the really hard one, we give "weight" to different subjects within in an article, based on ... now get ready for this ... the weight given to them in reliable sources.   This is hard for folks to understand.  What this means in practice, is that you have to read all the recent reliable sources on the topic, and judge (yes there is judgement involved) how much weight those sources  give the subject, and do the same in the Wikipedia article.  That is a lot of work.


 * What happens a lot of times in Wikipedia, is that editors come in with strong feelings that "X is really important" because of some experience they have had, and they add a lot of content on that to the article. It is very understandable, but this ends up skewing articles. (it gives what we call "undue weight" to a given subject.   This is something we struggle with a lot, and many many articles have problems with this.  You can imagine how easy this would be to mess up, right?  Say somebody loves vanilla ice cream, and they do a bunch of work and add a bunch of well-written and well-sourced content on vanilla ice cream,  to the Ice cream article, giving it say 3 inches of space.  This would skew the article, right?  Or somebody is a huge fan of Ferguson Jenkins from when they were a kid and they add loads of content about him to the Chicago Cubs article.  Same kind of issue.  This is part of the objection that other editors have made to your edits about dementia and statins.  I will circle back to this in just a bit.


 * One last thing. Above, I wrote that we determine  weight, based on what "reliable sources" say.  For health related topics (like side effects of statins) the standard for reliable sources is described here: WP:MEDRS.  If you want to stay involved in WP ( and i hope you do!)  and want to continue working on health content, you will need to understand MEDRS.   Basically, reliable sources for health are a) literature reviews published in the biomedical literature and b) statements by major medical or scientific bodies (like the American Heart Association or the NIH).   These are high standards and the reason that the community put this standard in place, is that people have very strong feelings about health - they live through things like what you have lived through and they find some information on the internet about that (and there is a lot of junk on the internet), and want to use those sources to support their content about their issue.


 * The sources in your first edit are not MEDRS sources, by the way. They are pretty good!  They are not kooky stuff at all.  But they are not recent reviews or statements by major medical/scientific bodies.


 * What we ask all editors to do in discussions about weight, is that everybody involved look at the most recent sources on a given topic (in this case, MEDRS sources that discuss the side effects of statins overall) and determine how much weight the sources give each kind of side effect, and reflect that in our article's content.


 * this sort of discussion does happen a lot. sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it goes badly wrong.  We are, right now, dealing with an editor who has been here for four years now, trying to add loads of content about bad sexual side effects of a hair-loss drug, to the article about that drug.  He really believes that the drug harmed him.  But the MEDRS sources do not say that the drug causes sexual dysfunction for sure.  He shows up every few months and tries to load up the article with content about this, and starts huge arguments at the article talk page, and lately has been getting really mean in his arguments on the article talk page and elsewhere.  We've tried to explain to him, what i am explaining to you, but he just will not hear it.  he is 100% focused on his personal issue.  So the community is probably going to topic ban him.  That is a very unhappy situation - the whole thing has been ugly and unpleasant for everybody involved.


 * all that said, sometimes there are gaps in articles, or places where articles are not up to date, and somebody comes to an article and fills that gap. Sometimes they start out giving that subject matter way too much weight... and this makes other editors go and review everything, and many times the new content stays, but is reduced in weight.   Sometimes the new content is not filling a gap at all, but instead is blowing something out of proportion, in which case, the article goes back to how it was.


 * humanity's knowledge of science/medicine develops all the time, and editors come and go. Articles in Wikipedia are really dynamic and the changes to them are always made by somebody being BOLD and making changes, and other editors reacting to them.  What we look for - how this place works - is editors working together,  trusting each other, and always, always going back to the sources to see what the sources say to determine weight and trying to reach consensus.  Trying to reach consensus, is the very heart of this place.  When editors try to reach consensus on content, including weight,  based on what reliable sources say, trusting each other, and discussing content and sources, it is a beautiful thing.  Really beautiful.  But too often discussions gets ugly and personalized on talk pages - editors get angry and start accusing other editors of all kinds of bad intentions.  This can become ugly (like with the balding drug guy).   That usually happens when somebody comes to wikipedia with strong feelings about something, and they don't have the self-discipline to set those feelings aside so they can really listen to other editors and to what the reliable sources say.


 * i have not looked into side effects of side effects of statins, so i cannot comment on the specific issue you of statins possibly causing dementia (i do understand the hypothesis that lowering cholesterol could cause neurodegeneration... but i have no idea what the current literature is saying about that). My goal here was to give you a sense of the big picture, so that you can work with other editors on the statin Talk pages, in a really Wikipedian way, and so that you don't end up frustrated, but instead can have a good experience here.


 * that was kind of long, but i hope that makes sense. Do you want to ask me anything, or say anything about these bigger picture issues?  Thanks again for your patience. Jytdog (talk) 11:44, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Alright, thanks for taking the time to fill me in. Would it be safe write that anecdotal reports suggest a link between atorvastatin and dementia, and explain how the science behind cholesterol supports that claim? Or maybe have a 'possible side effects' tab? I've only appended it with the FDA's warning on memory loss for now. Oceanlike (talk) 08:19, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks again for your patience and for being willing to learn how Wikipedia works. as i wrote above, i am not familiar recent reviews on side effects of statins so cannot comment on 1) how much WP:WEIGHT to give the potential for causing dementia or other neurodegeneration, nor 2) what content is reasonable to say about that.   On the Talk page of the statins article and the Atorvastatin articles to which you have contributed, in the yellow/brown box at the top of the page, you will find a subsection with an icon of books that starts out saying "Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined...".  There are links there, preformatted to give you recent reviews from Pubmed on the subject matter.  If you click on those links and go through the results, you will be able to find recent reviews discussing side effects of statins generally and atorvastatin in particular.  You should read them and see what they say about weight of importance of the dementia thing, as well as what they actually say.   Let the sources guide you, not your experience.  And please really talk with the other editors who are watching the article.  They probably know a lot about these drugs and can help you find and discuss the sources.  (I do hear you that this is potentially important...i just have no idea where the science stands.  i would be interested in exploring this but my plate is full now)   Good luck! Jytdog (talk) 13:17, 22 April 2015 (UTC)