For the last two years, the medical experts, from Tony Fauci on down, have been a disaster and have brought their profession to a point at which large numbers of Americans no longer trust their doctors.  However, two stories in the news about drug trials that seem to have had pretty miraculous outcomes in people with serious health disorders should remind us that modern medicine, when done right, is still a wonderful thing.

The last two years have been a black eye for medical science.  The medical establishment got everything wrong about COVID in the first instance, and the jury is still way, way out on whether the COVID vaccines were useful treatments or had side-effects so dangerous to so many that any utility they had against COVID is irrelevant.

Another obvious problem is the way the medical establishment is jumping onboard the transgender train.  There's no science at all "proving" transgenderism but doctors are doing terrible things to children and adults, whether because the doctors are true believers or because there's a lot of money on the table.

What you might not have been aware of is the serious problem in the world of scientific publications, including medical publications.  The problem is called "the replication crisis":

In 2015, a Science article caused an upheaval in the psychological sciences. A group of researchers attempted to replicate a hundred published studies. They found that two thirds of these could not reproduce the so-called "statistically significant" effects found in the original studies, so the published studies had failed a basic check. Cancer studies have faced similar problems with non-replicable findings — a stark reminder that this replication crisis can have real-world consequences.

In the hard sciences (because the social sciences are always a joke), if someone can't get the same results doing a published experiment, what we're looking at isn't science at all.  It's just magic and opinions.

Image: Medicines by rawpixel.com.

However, when it comes to the two medical stories that recently emerged, they don't seem like magic and opinions.  Instead, they seem to have reproducible real-world impacts.  The first report is about a drug that helps treat Type II diabetes (usually associated with obesity) as well as everyday weight problems:

A diabetes drug taken once a week lead to dramatic weight loss in people who have obesity, according to a recently published study in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study authors said that participants in the 72-week trial lost up to 20% of their body weight.

"The findings indicate tirzepatide may be a potential therapeutic option for individuals living with obesity, with participants losing between 16% and 22.5% of their starting weight", the authors said in the study.

The drug, tirzepatide, is a novel drug that was recently approved by the Food & Drug Administration to help treat type 2 diabetes through a once-weekly injection. The drug works on two hormones that help control blood sugar and send fullness signals to the brain, the authors explained in the study.

If you are or you know someone struggling with Type II diabetes, this is huge, because the diabetes and the weight tend to be in a diabolical dance that sees each encouraging the other.  And of course, if you just want to lose weight, maybe there really will be an effective diet pill!

The other recent medical news is just as exciting, considering how common colon cancer is:

A new colorectal cancer drug has shocked researchers with how effective it is against the highly dangerous disease, after it virtually cured every member of a clinical trial.

Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody drug, smashed expectations in a recent trial run by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, sponsored by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

A year after the trial's completion, each of the 18 participants had their disease go into complete remission, with doctors unable to find signs of the cancer in their body.

'I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,' said Dr Luis Diaz, one of the lead authors of the paper and an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Although the drug was used against a very specific type of colorectal tumor, with a tightly defined genetic makeup, doctors think it could be used against other cancers as well.  The doctors involved in the research are now enrolling patients with gastric, prostate, and pancreatic cancers.

When I grew up, every one of my mother's friends who was diagnosed with breast cancer died within five years.  As an adult myself, although I've had many friends diagnosed with breast cancer, only one has died despite the passage of three, five, ten, or more years since treatment.  Doctors may have become dangerously irresponsible when it came to COVID, and there's a terrible industry making money off of "transgender" madness, but there's still wonderful stuff happening, and we don't do ourselves any favors if we forget that, in many ways, we still live in an age of wonders and miracles.