There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.
> I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes"
How can you be so certain? I did not find any credible source correlating microbial rennet to rash. Thus I would not rule out that this was simply a coincidence or at least not applicable for most people.
The story is about how medicine assumes that if a little oxygen is good, more is better. But in the real world too much oxygen destroys lungs, and we’re all deteriorated by even a little too much O2.
I, for one, welcome the reconsideration of oxygen anti-therapy.
This is an important story. A lot of people are over-oxygenated by their health care professionals.
A common way that people induce 'too much oxygen' is by hyperventilating. One effect of hyperventilating is that it shrinks the peripheral arteries - in the brain, fingers, toes.
The simplest treatment for hyperventilation is recycling exhaled carbon dioxide with a paper bag.
What if admitting science-mistakes made the weight loss drugs unnecessary? I'm sure the causes of the obesity epidemic could be acknowledged without framing it as a mistake.
One of the neat features of the HN Poll is that I can add more choices. Respond to this comment with your favorite 'science mistake', and I'll consider adding it to the poll.
It's not any sort of reasonable discussion if you present a very very slanted set of contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science" (as if that were one cabal), and do not for example list any counter examples of self corrections or false accusations such as the autism/MMR issue, or phlogiston or the aether or the bananas claims about covid vaccines and 5G phone reception...
I put a top-level post on this submission requesting more poll options.
> contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science"
My poll attempted to ascribed malice to the powerful people who use the trappings of science to concentrate wealth. I made a similar comment 2 days ago: "[...] the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053362
> self corrections or false accusations
I went to a seminar around 2004. The speaker mentioned a foundational science mistake from the 1800's. In the past year I've heard this mistake was corrected, but the correction was classified. <shrug>.
There is no official guide to "how to prevent your child from becoming Autistic", so this issue is still open.
Scott Adams' has been posting deranged shit on Twitter for years now. His credibility as a social commentator is exhausted, and if you don't know that then you're going to be sent on some pretty moronic alt-right snipe chases at his behest.
> "Tongue in cheek" is an idiom
Your "joke" is 6 paragraphs long. Go get a hobby or a girlfriend or a job or something, this is not a healthy expression of irony or frustration with the government. Repeat this shit in another thread or comment and you'll be run out of this site on a rail.
I'm just a simple former taxi-driver. I went the extra mile for some of my passengers - bailing them out of jail, etc - and made notes about people's struggles with the machine.
The guy who I bailed out - a few years ago his friend shared on facebook that he'd been arrested again. I went to his hearing - he saw me. The judge was very stern with all the other people, but said to my passenger, "you haven't caused any trouble since you were arrested years ago, but you did miss your court date so I have to do something..." She was going to give him 30 days with work release, but he said he'd just miss the next court date so they might as well keep him. I sent him some money for his books, he sent me a post card saying that it meant a lot to have the support of someone on the outside.
> this is not a healthy expression of irony or frustration with the government.
Sometimes all you can do is make fun of your predicament.
I'm about to head out to hustle for a while, will respond to you later tonight.
>the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain.
It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.
I expect that the high spending on ineffective care is a wealth effect rather than something more indirect. The money is there, so people use it. Veterinary care is sort of similar (spending has skyrocketed as disposable income has increased).
There's also probably technology/knowledge effects, new things that are worth paying a lot for, people staying relatively healthy but getting fragile in the process, etc.
The author of this Ask HN is asking because conventional cancer medicine is not good enough. I think cancer dissidents say the screening programs for early treatment makes the doctors look better by increasing the number of non-fatal cases that are “diagnosed”. But most people who die after a certain age all have non-fatal tumors in their bodies…
> Q: What do you call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine
Medicine that doesn’t work is grandfathered in to be called Medicine to. I don’t know how standard harmful treatments get retired from active use.
> I don’t know how standard harmful treatments get retired from active use.
So naturally, you've assumed they don't get retired? I assure you, they do: sometimes it takes longer than it should, but if there's evidence that a treatment is harmful, it eventually does fall out of practice. Very few leeches are used in medicine today, in case you haven't noticed.
The ProPublica story you linked was published in 2017, so I'm not hearing that this problem of treatment 8 years ago is still a problem today. It also doesn't make clear what evidence it has against stents. I found some studies from 2003/2004 that say they found insufficient evidence for stents preventing "mortality, acute myocardial infarction, or coronary artery bypass surgery". However, there was evidence for "substantial reductions in angiographic restenosis rates and the subsequent need for repeated PTCA".
Now setting aside the pause for a second. Don't look this up: do you even know what "angiographic restenosis" is? If not, why would you think you're qualified to have an opinion on this? Because you read an article in ProPublica, you think you're a cardiologist now?
And here's my big picture point: yes, you can find problems with the medical field. Doctors are humans, and they make mistakes. But the track record of doctors as compared to random quackery off the internet, is absolutely stellar. You're criticizing medicine without comparing it to anything. Some of your criticisms are valid areas we could improve on, but the alternative you're offering is much, much worse. People die from under-studied treatments all the time.
American medicine has a tendency to pay for things that are fantastically expensive, but aren’t really what the patient actually needs. I found this blog post about this phenomenon a few years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet
Contaminants are a common problem in industrial food manufacturing: citric acid (fungal contaminants), vitamin C (heavy metals), and "enzymes" (?).
I'm glad Italians insist their cheeses be made following the traditional methods.