Linda, very well written post.  Thank you for writing better than I do.
 
Lin, here you are:
http://www.smartgroups.com/message/viewdiscussion.cfm?gid=1423922
&messageid=17126
 
I used the word "proven" myself because Dr. Murray has in personal
communication, because there has recently been independent confirmation
of the final step, but mostly because there are just so many people who
think that *everything* is just "opinion" and just do not at all grasp
the importance of multiple, well designed studies.
 
That said, there are degrees of rigor.  Some are sure to want some type
of further work such as reverse study, others who are also well respected
will have already accepted the concept as proven in a past year without
the recent independent confirmation work.  (Actually, as of yesterday in
personal communications I have heard of one of the first and it sounds
like two of the second who exist.)
 
There are a lot of people who jump on me for being a stickler about
knowing the differences between well studied concepts and ones which are
still hypothetical.  It will possibly surprise some of them that there
certainly are those who are more rigorous in their expectations.
 
Still, it is important that people know the difference between the
concepts of hypothesized and proven, and I think that too few people do.
I also think that a lot of the current distrust of medical science is
because in reports and interpretation of reports hypotheses are too often
treated as if they were proven concepts with enough good research behind
them many times when that is not the case.  Executives and administrators
often push for preliminary reports or require them.  Then when some of
the hypotheses don't pan out -- which is inevitable for some -- people
think that the researchers don't know their bottoms from their elbows
when the problems almost never happened with the researchers ("Cold
fusion" is one of the exceptions because those researchers were the ones
who messed up.).  Usually the problem in understanding typically happens
elsewhere, usually in the PR reports, the news stories written from the
PR reports, or in how people interpreted the reports.  There is a saying
from an extremely well respected physicist which I will paraphrase which
mentions percentages of failure in relation to hypotheses.  I do not
recall the exact percentages off-hand of hypotheses he expected to not
pan out, but I recall pretty close.  It goes something like this
paraphrase: "If you are failing 80% or more of the time then the problems
you have selected are beyond your reach, otherwise if you are failing
most of the time then you are working at the right level, but if you are
failing less often than that then you are lazy or need to extend your
mental reach." As you see, there are risks in treating all stages of
inquiry as if they were equal, and all of us humans have ideas which
never turn out to be correct and that is to be expected and even desired
by those who go into science, so it is normal in science to expect a
number of concepts to not pan out once enough is known, even though the
concepts usually would originally be based on highly suggestive or
intriguing observations.
 
I also have noticed that some people think that research just means
looking things up.  The ideas of things like controlling variables, or
having double blind studies so that a researcher does not accidently
affect the results in interpretation, or having independent confirmation
just are not grasped at all by some people.  Believe me, science is based
upon CHALLENGING the concepts under study in ways that can be tested, not
upon just looking things up, or debating opinions (which is not a real
challenge).
 
One thing that I loved about your post, Linda, is that you pointed out
that there are always exceptions.  Boy, are there ever, esp. in biology
since we all vary as individuals and in other ways.  Even with a lot of
variables controlled there can be things that simply can't be controlled.
Think about a place of work or study and contagious viruses.  The
exposure rate is high, yet some people will get very sick while some
won't get sick at all, and some may have long lasting negative aspects.
So, whether those differences were just from a healthy person missing the
contagion, or better fighting it off, or having different genetics the
environmental effects on the body from having not had that virus differ
from those of some who did get it who may suffer long term damage.
 
I am hoping that if ferrets also have genetic impacts on adrenal disease
that the expanded genetics research at UC Davis shows something useful
(hopefully) with an easily spotted marker which may help decrease the
number of early age cases or at least better spot ferrets for whom
preventative measures should not be stinted upon, but who knows... We
will all learn when we learn and no good comes of rushing hard work that
needs to be precise.
 
BTW, there also could well turn out to be other things which influence LH
levels, either by increasing them or decreasing them, and those things
will need study.  On that score, exercise intrigues me due to there being
human epidemiological studies showing lower rates of multiple types of
hormonal malignancies among those who exercise a lot.  Note that here we
are speaking again of hypotheses.
 
Meanwhile, the increase in FSH (which is also increased by the same
things that increase LH output -- I don't personally yet know of
exceptions for outside influences yet but there might be some because
I have not looked carefully) is said by researchers to stand a good
chance of also having a bad effect on adrenals because of the estrogens
it increases but the research on that component is at this time
incomplete, so influence from that remains hypothetical till more is
known (and, yes, I need to search in that, too).
 
What is known is that there is now independent confirmation of the final
step showing that things which result in persistent high levels of LH
(such as neutering and not enough hours of complete darkness) lead to
adrenal growths.
 
(Oh, when I had the flu I got down the location of a researcher wrong
in my hints, but only one person even noticed the hints and asked about
them, anyway, because so many were distracted by fights about hypotheses,
human or group behavior, etc.  so I guess no harm was done...)
[Posted in FML issue 5216]