[jmcqk6]

What do you think about the mis-alignment between goals here?

For medical research, the goal is to find general practices that will broadly help, and identify risks with the intervention. Even then, with many interventions, it's understood that they will effect people differently.

For individuals, they don't care about variation in communities, or standard medical practices, they are looking for relief for their specific condition.

Of course, declaring that just because something worked for one person, it should work for others, is wrong in both camps.

I feel like a big part of the disconnect here, and a big reason why people are talking past each other, is that they actually have different goals, and aren't really aware of that difference.

[stalfie]

Well, to be honest I think the primary disconnect is in epistemological understanding. The OP did not declare peptides to be a personal revolution, he/she seemingly generalised their own experience to be widely applicable.

Basic human thought patterns usually lead people to think that anecdotes about their personal experience is valuable for understanding the world, but this is wrong. The scientific revolution basically illustrated the flaw in this premise outside of hypothesis generation. It takes specific education to make human beings truly believe that their anecdotal experiences are mostly irrelevant beyond understanding their immediate circumstances. The proportion of humanity that truly think this way is relatively small.

Understanding the world through anecdotes still works okay-ish for a lot of areas, but ascertaining relatively subjective effects of experimental pharmaceuticals is not one of them. But to many people it's non obvious that this is the case. And as a general method of thinking about this issue, it is just the wrong way to go about things.

And that's the disconnect, in my opinion. The OP drew a conclusion from a thought pattern that comes easily to human beings, but that is just wrong in this situation. Of course, perhaps this is reinforced by underlying motivations, but that's not what makes people talk past each other. These kinds of discussion are usually driven by so called "deep disagreements" in epistemological understanding, in my experience.