Lessons from history #10: How magnesium lost its mojo

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cheap, non-proprietary, readily available treatment for patients with heart attacks (acute myocardial infarction - AMI)? That’s what doctors wanted to believe, so when they saw the early results of magnesium therapy, they did exactly that. Magnesium therapy for AMI has been labelled a “lesson in medical humility”, but I see it as another example of the pervasive bias amongst researchers, doctors and the public that leads them to overestimate the effectiveness of medical therapies. Put simply, it was another case of ‘believing is seeing’.

Animal research: just another WOFTAM?

The idea is that experiments are first performed in the lab, are then performed in animals, and these experiments inform the eventual human studies. As a (seemingly) necessary step in this chain, animal experiments are (rightly or wrongly) tolerated based on their eventual benefit to humans. Animal studies however, are not good predictors of human trials, often do not inform human trials, and are methodologically inferior to human trials, so much so, that the results from animal studies are unreliable and biased. In other words, animal studies are often of no benefit to humans. Arguably, they do not benefit humans at all, let alone enough to justify their use. We either need to fix the problem or get out of the animal research game.