5 replies·
A pattern I find odd. Semax and Selank are both marked evidence: early, which on this site is a step above the none that most of the popular compounds carry. Both are registered medicines in Russia. Semax is used clinically there after ischaemic stroke.
And they get a fraction of the discussion that BPC-157 gets. Why?
Because "early evidence for a modest cognitive effect" is a much worse story than "no evidence at all for dramatic tissue regeneration".
This is not sarcasm. An absence of data is a blank space and people fill blank spaces with the most attractive available claim. A small real effect measured in a real study comes with an effect size, and effect sizes are disappointing almost by construction.
The compounds with the most enthusiasm behind them are consistently the ones where there is nothing to constrain the enthusiasm.
There is a less cynical reason too, which is that the literature is genuinely hard to get at.
Much of it is Russian-language, in journals that are not well indexed, from a period and a system with different trial conventions. So even a motivated reader hits a wall that they do not hit with a Croatian rodent paper published in English.
early is doing honest work there: there is human data, it is real, and assessing its quality from outside is difficult.
That matches what I find when I go looking. The stroke indication is the best documented and it is also the least relevant to why people here would take it — a neuroprotective effect in acute ischaemia says very little about focus in a healthy adult.
Which is its own version of the translation problem. Not species this time. Population.
That is a really good framing and it generalises. Every compound on this site has a translation gap somewhere:
Naming which gap you are crossing is most of the analysis.
I am going to steal that taxonomy.
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