From: dpc47852@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Daniel Paul Checkman)
Subject: Re: Is MSG sensitivity superstition?
Article-I.D.: news.C5wI4F.Dt
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 22

bruce@Data-IO.COM (Bruce Reynolds) writes:

>Anecedotal evidence is worthless.  Even doctors who have been using a drug
>or treatment for years, and who swear it is effective, are often suprised
>at the results of clinical trials.  Whether or not MSG causes describable,
>reportable, documentable symptoms should be pretty simple to discover.  

I tend to disagree- I think anecdotal evidence, provided there is a lot of it,
and it is fairly consistent, will is very important.  First, it points to the
necessity of doing a study, and second, it at least says that the effects are
all psychological (or possibly allergy in this case).  As I've pointed out 
before, pyschological effects are no less real than other effects.  One       
person's "make-believe" can easily be another person's reality.  Using 
psychadelic drugs in a bizarre and twisted example, the hallucinations one
person experiences on an acid trip cannot be guaranteed to another person on
an acid trip- there is no clinical evidence that those effects are always going
to happen.  Anyhow, that was a pretty lame example, but hopefully I made my
point- it's all a matter of perception, and as long as someone ingesting MSG
perceives it as causing bad effects, then s/he can definitely experience those
affects.  On the other hand, it could just be an allergy to the food it's in,   or something.  Still, anecdotal evidence is not worthless- it's the stuff that
leads to the study being done.
-Dan
