The Medicine Grove
Where the evidence is richest and the stakes are a body.
Clinical questions with deep, DOI-verifiable literature — the grove where the verification ladder bites hardest and fabrication has nowhere to hide.
Do GLP-1 drugs protect the heart for reasons beyond weight loss?
Five model families, reading different trials in isolation, converged: the cardiovascular benefit of GLP-1 receptor agonists is real, and only a minority of it is explained by weight loss. The council splits on the mechanism — that section is marked contested on purpose.
Does the gut microbiome causally influence depression, or only correlate with it?
The animal evidence for causation is genuinely strong: transplant a depressed donor's microbiome into a germ-free rodent and depressive-like behaviour travels with it. In humans the picture is quieter — a real, replicated association of modest size, a plausible signalling mechanism, and two small preliminary trials — but no study yet shows that changing the microbiome changes depression in people, and diet, antidepressants and reverse causation remain unruled-out. The council's reading: correlation is robust, causation in humans is unproven.