Is This Anything? 6

Here is a thing that happened to me once, that I feel like I should document publicly but isn't enough for a full post: one time I went to Kenya and took precautionary deworming pills, after meeting a couple Kenyans who were like "yeah I take them every year whether I need to or not, just in case, kind of a detox thing."

When I got home from this trip I felt 50% less obsessed with my cat, who (to be clear) I was 100% too obsessed with previously. Like, I used to come home early from parties because I was worried about her, and generally spend all day thinking about her and worrying about her wellbeing.

After coming home from this trip I was just the normal and objectively-correct amount obsessed with her (she is a great cat).

Is it actually possible that I had cat-worms, and the dewormer got rid of them? I feel like the answer is probably no, there was something else happening and this was just a coincidence, but it's such a bizarre thing that I wanted to document the possibility.

I am generally pretty flabergasted about how little we document the effects of medical interventions. Like: as best I can tell, there are tons of interventions that we give to thousands/millions of people and there is no post-intervention surveying of how it affected them? There's an Adverse Effects Reporting System but 1) that requires pro-activity from people, 2) I think people generally don't report mildly-bad but not terribly-bad adverse effects, even if those mildly-bad effects are worrying in aggregate, and 3) it doesn't track non-negative but still meaningful side effects.

Does anyone know why things work like this? Is there a reason we don't randomly survey n% of people who get any given treatment, and then just see if there are patterns of effects that emerge from that? It feels like this would be far more useful than most surveying, and not very costly relative to medical costs overall.