There's a huge difference between "you can give yourself an extra two percent by gnawing on a tree" and "if you follow orders we can wipe out almost every single-celled organism in your entire body within twenty-four hours".
It's a few decades later and we are dealing with
the rise of super bugs instead of living in the
predicted disease-free utopia.
You're cherry-picking, so I'll do a bit of that myself too:
We eradicated smallpox. Tangled bedsheets kill more people than polio. Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives. Malaria will die with Anopheles gambiae.
People once knew that flight was impossible. Not just hard, but impossible, prevented by the laws of physics and not meant for mankind. I flew home from my holiday vacation yesterday. It cost me as much as a good pair of shoes. Less than two days' pay at minimum wage.
"We can never know enough to be safe" is simply and obviously false. Crab-bucket thinking at its finest. We can improve the human condition. We can know enough. Even better, we're getting to the point where we know enough to also recognize that we do or don't know enough.
If you really believe that single bad actors will inevitably ruin everything good and we cannot ever make anything better, well, good luck to you. I submit that, with that point of view, you're better off quitting now so you don't have to experience the doomed future you propose.
We can never know enough to be safe" is simply and obviously false. Crab-bucket thinking at its finest.
Way to go to wildly twist my words out of shape.
I submit that, with that point of view, you're better off quitting now so you don't have to experience the doomed future you propose.
I'm quite open about my struggles with being suicidal. But let's give the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't actually know that.
As kindly as possible, actively encouraging an internet stranger to off themselves because you don't agree with what you imagine they said has got to be one of the absolute ugliest tactics I've ever seen in an internet argument.
So I'm done here. That's not something I consider to be remotely within the realm of a good faith argument.
Note to self: Suggest to my would-be co-founder that such a thing should be a bannable offense on his forum. Cuz: Ew!
Now I'm curious. What did you intend to write? Your post gives equal credence to herbal pseudoscience and modern medicine and, in context, questions whether antibiotics were worth it.
Yes, I should probably find a way to condemn luddite fatalism and anti-intellectualism without pointing out that they are species-wide suicide, exactly as irrational as the personal version and exactly as unacceptable to push for. Maybe I should have simply downvoted you, flagged your post, and hoped nobody saw it. I'll even apologize; I am sorry.
That said, honestly, "disagree" is entirely too weak a word for my perspective on the beliefs your comment helps people believe. I'm going to contest moloch-worship and naturopathy and luddism even when they're unintentional. When they show up on Facebook and Reddit they end with twentysomething mommies deciding not to vaccinate their babies and assaulting Waymo safety personnel. And, well, my real audience are those potential antivaxxers and bucketed crabs, so logos is actively counterproductive and I'm stuck with ethos and pathos, neither of which are anything like good faith. :/
I was diagnosed in my mid thirties with atypical cystic fibrosis. By the time I was diagnosed, I was at death's door. My specialist informed me that people like me don't get well, that symptom management is the name of the game. I informed him that it might be true that I would spend the rest of my life fighting off the next infection, but this one had to go as it was killing me. He physically took a step back as if I had slapped him. He also began scheduling me fewer appointments as I got healthier while expressing zero curiosity as to how I was accomplishing that.
I've spent time around antivaxxers. Many of them have legitimate reasons for pursuing alternative medicine. Those reasons are rooted in being failed by conventional medicine. Some of those folks gave me useful information after doctors dismissively wrote me off for dead.
There's a lot of information out there on the importance of gut microbes and even how body chemistry fosters biofilm which promotes antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is potentially reversible.
I had an infection that the doctors never ID'd that was not responding to antibiotics. I went through multiple rounds of antibiotics, some of which had side effects like "kills some percentage of people." I saw zero improvement.
I came up with my own hypothesis as to what was going on, ran it past a friend who happened to be a doctor and he said it wasn't crazy talk. Within two weeks, my condition stabilized and I began gradually improving after talking doctors into giving me certain antibiotics and pursuing specific therapies.
Antibiotic resistance tends to be fostered in developing countries that lack adequate water and sewer infrastructure. There is also research out there on failure to thrive and stunting that I've looked at. Stunting has a component of "probably infection related." Some kids don't respond to simply giving them more food. You also need to add probiotics and address the hygiene issues.
The gut is home to about 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in our body. So digestion, nutrition, diet, fasting, etc all can have significant impact on immune health and how the body handles infection.
It's possible to use spices, like cinnamon and oregano, to help fight infection.
There's a lot more to it and it's a complicated topic. Also, lots of folks believe I'm insane and telling tall tales, because a former homemaker can't possibly understand anything about health that doctors and scientists can't figure out, no.
So, have a nice day. This is probably a pointless discussion for various reasons.
talking doctors into giving me certain antibiotics
a former homemaker can't possibly understand anything
about health that doctors and scientists can't figure
out, no.
sigh.
Publish a case study. Please. I beg you.
The people that went into the "people don't get better from this" statistic did not just all lay down and die. I guarantee you they went home and searched for a cure the same way you did. But they aren't here and you are.
Normally I'd say you were lucky, but you claim a testable hypothesis that made sense to an MD and then worked. And you seem rational enough that I don't think you'd be giving "specific therapies" so much credit if they hadn't made the difference.
And you know what we call alternative medicine with testable hypotheses that made sense to an MD and were then proven to work? "Medicine". We went back to leeches and maggots and poop transplants because someone proved that they work. But someone had to prove it. Someone had to brainstorm the principled explanation, someone had to write it down, someone had to add it to the standard, indexed, well-known and searchable body of knowledge. Because there are not enough doctors in the world for them to spend hundreds of hours researching each edge case when they're already massively overworked by the hour per kid it takes to stave off MMR and tetanus and pertussis. It needs to be indexed and searchable, it needs to be in the knowledge base, it needs to be standard.
Getting better from things that "people don't get better from" is by definition novel. Solving something that's common enough to have statistics is similarly valuable. A doctor friend's name will get you past the bigots and a publication will be worth his time. You claim a hypothesis, a principled explanation, and a measure of peer review, so you're good on the fundamentals. If you lead with a technical root-cause analysis and reveal your "specific therapies" with a dramatic flourish you'll even turn the "tall tales" into bonus points for creativity and some word-of-mouth publicity. Your case is entirely publishable.
So prove me wrong. Please. "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth." Publish it. Save the lives of all the future people that'll get something that "people don't get better from". If you're right about cinnamon and oregano, contribute some good hard evidence and help bring general beliefs into better alignment with reality, which'll save more lives than just the people that share your exact epidemiology. Strike that "alternative" off the medicine that healed you. I'd damn sure like to live forever and any claim that reproduces can help me do that. Bring everyone up to your level instead of sneering down your nose while handing the antivaxxers ammunition.
I've been doing this about 18 years. I'm no longer friends with said MD.
The piece he said made sense:
I figured my husband brought a parasitic infection back from Saudi, a class of trypanosoma, and was reinfecting me every time we has sex and this was why it didn't matter how many antibiotics I took. I was constantly being reinfected.
So I told my husband "you are never touching me again without a condom" and I stabilized in two weeks.
Then I began asking for standard CF antibiotics that are fairly strong but don't have side effects like "kills some percentage of people."
I managed to get on zithromax maintenance therapy, a standard treatment for CF. It has a long half life. So I was on it like two weeks out of the month or something and it's good for like another ten days after the final dose. So I essentially had antibiotics in my system all the time, all but maybe four days a month.
Then a med student at the teaching hospital that I had good rapport with put me on Levaquin, another fairly strong but doesn't routinely kill people drug that is commonly prescribed for CF. After that, I mostly went back to needing antibiotics during stress times, like midterms, finals, Christmas. That was my normal for much of my life.
CF doesn't actually make you sick per se. It causes a bottle neck in the processing of certain molecules due to a defective cell channel. Lots of secondary and tertiary and fourth order consequences grow out of that.
I got extremely interested in what do we know about what happens at the cellular level. I talked to a guy with a PhD in Chemistry. I talked to a guy with a PhD in Biology. I asked a lot of questions of a former RN and she told me "You are asking things they don't have answers for. They don't actually know what that drug does at the cellular level."
It's been a long journey and I'm still struggling to survive financially. I've had multiple blogs where I've tried to find the words to express some of it, but I have no audience, I can get no traction. That means I get no feedback for what makes sense to people and what doesn't.
I'm not sneering down my nose at anyone. I've been thrown off of multiple forums. I've been subjected to really ugly personal attacks. Mods on most forums will not protect me. They tell me I'm the problem and the people attacking me are fine and I need to STFU.
So, you know, right after I win the lottery or marry a millionaire I'll get on some attempt to publish something for some internet stranger who initially told me to go kill myself. Sure. Cuz I owe you so fucking much.
Meanwhile, I'm still struggling to make ends meet and try to eat everyday. And that's where my focus needs to remain for the time being because most of the world quite seriously wishes I would drop dead in earnest and has been actively trying to help make sure I die instead of merely being a flippant and lousy argument tactic.
We eradicated smallpox. Tangled bedsheets kill more people than polio. Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives. Malaria will die with Anopheles gambiae.
People once knew that flight was impossible. Not just hard, but impossible, prevented by the laws of physics and not meant for mankind. I flew home from my holiday vacation yesterday. It cost me as much as a good pair of shoes. Less than two days' pay at minimum wage.
"We can never know enough to be safe" is simply and obviously false. Crab-bucket thinking at its finest. We can improve the human condition. We can know enough. Even better, we're getting to the point where we know enough to also recognize that we do or don't know enough.
If you really believe that single bad actors will inevitably ruin everything good and we cannot ever make anything better, well, good luck to you. I submit that, with that point of view, you're better off quitting now so you don't have to experience the doomed future you propose.