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]