Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story

Scott corrects and deepens his earlier Omegaven (fish-oil infant IV nutrition) story after a reader flagged a Cochrane paper. Retelling via Dr. Gura's account, he sets the record straight (he had a few details wrong; links his Mistakes page) and reframes: the FDA-as-agency actually comes off well (it granted the exemptions, funded a small study), but the real villain is 'the hurdle' -- everything in medicine is default-illegal until you clear a ~10-year, million-dollar process, which turns many actors into 'villains' and requires an improbable chain of heroic 'cowboys' (0.01% compounding) to get anything approved.

Quality 74 · Strong. Strong (upper): an intellectually honest self-correction (a model of updating) plus a genuinely sharp reframe (the FDA-agency-is-good-but-the-hurdle-is-the-problem distinction, the cowboy-chain argument); one of his better FDA/medicine essays.

Claude’s paradigm shift 48 · Moderate. Moderate: the FDA-vs-the-hurdle distinction is a sharp reframe, though it extends Scott's standing FDA critique.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. Minor/within-discourse: contributes to the FDA-reform conversation; no direct material change.