Comment on Psuedoscience (?) by Jim Petrie

I think anyone who assumes that correlation equals causation is indulging in pseudoscience.
I have been involved in the area of kidney transplantation for many years. As regards a drug called cyclosporine , we know
1. It helps reduce the incidence of rejection
2, It often knocks the transplanted kidney around, reducing its function.
Because of point 2, if the function of a transplanted kidney goes off, an almost universal reaction is to reduce the cyclosporine dose.
The manufacturers produced observational studies showing a correlation of good transplant outcomes with high cyclosporine doses.
The reason for this observation was that only patients with good kidneys could tolerate high cyclosporine doses !
Randomised control trials sorted this point out,
Now if planet earth is our patient …and we have one patient …how do we design a randomized controlled trial?
Jim Petrie