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Comment by fghgfdfg | Hacker News Reader

Everything has risks. Maybe you change your diet and end up doing an unfamiliar food preparation and you screw it up and end up with a case of salmonella or e. coli. Or you do your usual thing and it happens anyway.

It's inane to suggest anything labeled "medication" should only be taken in life-threatening circumstances. Everything you ingest is going to have an impact on your body - some good, some bad, many both. Medications have a particularly strong impact, but are also highly controlled. You can judge the probability of various outcomes very well, which makes it a lot easier to come to a clear conclusion about using them or not.

And I'm going to assume you didn't intend to say that merely going to the doctor should be avoided except in life-threatening circumstances.

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Of course everything has risks, but I'm just advocating not taking risks with extreme downside when the positive upside is small. Eating is necessary for life, but taking a pill to reduce the risk of acid-reflux symptoms is not.

> _Medications have a particularly strong impact, but are also highly controlled. You can judge the probability of various outcomes very well, which makes it a lot easier to come to a clear conclusion about using them or not._

This is the main point where we disagree. You say medications are controlled, but I see alarming numbers of recalls of drugs [1]. Controlled studies only show a small part of the picture of the long-term impact of a particular drugs' use.

> And I'm going to assume you didn't intend to say that merely going to the doctor should be avoided except in life-threatening circumstances.

All I'm saying is that going to the doctor has risks that need to be considered. And when a doctor recommends some treatment, ask what he would do if he was in your situation, or what recommendation she would give to her brother.

1. http://www.raps.org/Regulatory-Focus/News/2014/08/11/20005/N...

It's not just a question about the magnitude of the possible upside or downside though, it's also about how likely they are to occur. If you offer me the opportunity to almost certainly make every day slightly better with the risk of killing me at a rate of once in the current age of the universe I'm going to take it. It's a tiny upside with a massive downside, but it would be irrational not to take it given the chances involved.

Medications absolutely are controlled. That doesn't mean they don't have issues, but are you willing to suggest medications are less controlled than food? I don't need to hope I've washed my medications well enough, nor do I need to ensure I've heated them to at least a certain temperature for a length of time, nor do I need to worry about cross contamination or any such thing. This isn't to say medications are without risk, but compared to produce, meat, or eggs I have a much better idea about what exactly is entering my body when I consume it.

>All I'm saying is that going to the doctor has risks that need to be considered.

I doubt that very much. Are the risks significantly greater than the risk you likely took getting to the doctor in the first place? I'd be shocked.

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