Comment by grafporno | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grafporno | Hacker News Reader

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You know hay fever is an allergy, right? And that you are allergic to specific pollen? These pollen are _seasonal_. It's not suprising that your symptoms are now gone, it's very probable that the allergen is just gone (for the season). The snake-oil has done nothing.

Get a proper allergy test.

> I think that to dismiss everything that's not evidence based medicine as snake oil, like this article does, is just as bad as dismissing mainstream medicine like Goop appears to do.

I really don't think you are in a position to judge that.

"I really don't think you are in a position to judge that. "

Neither are you. You can't just dismiss someone's experience as bullshit.

They provided a completely rational explanation for what's going on.

Simply waiting 4-8 weeks treats the vast majority of common issues. Either because they get better, the environment changes, or because the brain ends up ignoring repeated stimulus. Which is the secret to much of this stuff, they don't say just wait but because treatments are designed to take a while a significant number of people will make the association.

PS: Some include useful diet changes and exercise, but people often ignore their doctors giving the same advice so YMMV.

A completely rational explanation that may or may not be the answer.

If my car disappears from my garage, it may be because it was stolen, or maybe because it was transported to an alien planet by extra-terrestrial life forms.

My assertion that it was E.T. does not mean that your counter-assertion that it was stolen is true. Maybe I lent it to a friend and forgot, or my wife took it to be pimped out on Overhaulin', or that it was repossessed due to some bank error.

It's quite appropriate to raise additional possible explanations. It's quite inappropriate to tell someone that their treatment is in no way causative to the amelioration of symptoms, especially when they cannot know for certain that they were not.

I'm note sure I follow your logic. Are you saying that if you can't give specific, alternative explanations for the missing car, we must consider aliens a plausible explanation?

I'm saying that if you, a person who is probably not privy to the medical details of another random internet poster, cannot factually assert that dietary changes had nothing to do with his hay fever, then it is inappropriate to assert that it had nothing to do with his hay fever as fact.

We know that there are foods that have medical benefit. There are foods that contain anti-histamine capabilities, for example, or decongestant capabilities that could have been positively impactful on hay fever. These may have been a part of OP's dietary supplements.

Without knowing what the supplements were, we cannot dismiss that they might possibly have been of aid.

I never said it was the correct answer, but if you say the car was captured by aliens and I say it may have just been towed. The rational thing is to consider things in order of probability vs. risk not necessarily go with aliens every time.

I mean sure it could have been stolen, or towed, or aliens, etc. But, the point is when what happens can have reasonable explanations it's not evidence for ET.

The OP I'm responding to said, specifically "The snake-oil has done nothing," which they cannot know for certain, especially given that the dietary supplements were not even listed.

Which OP said that? Can you link/quote them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14787849

sorry, this is reply, posted to wrong place..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14792139

Would you take 1:1,000 odds that it did something? If not saying it did nothing is perfectly reasonable. I mean sure the sun might go out tomorrow, but reasonable assumptions are reasonable. Further logically he said it may have been this, but clearly the magic beans where worthless. Which is different than saying it defiantly was this and therefore the magic beans are worthless.

PS: And no I would not take those odds even though it may have helped, there are odds vastly below 1%.

Fair enough - though this was what your analogy was about? Not the rational explanation provided?

Nonsense. One's personal experiences are worthless as evidence, and all theories are subject to Occam's Razor. That you dislike these principles being applied to some subject is your own problem.

No, but he did offer up a possible explanation for the symptoms disappearing. That GP had changed diets and tried acupuncture may just be coincidental with the pollen running its course.

He writes that he has had that over a decade. Maybe he would have noticed it himself that it was seasonal.

I just don't like the tone when people have difficult problems, make an observation and get dismissed immediately because their observation doesn't fit with the mainstream.

I started doing meditation and yoga before it was cool and whenever I mentioned that meditation seems to help with my depression and anxiety there were always plenty of smartasses telling me this is all bullshit. Now, 25 years later they suddenly start listening.

There are plenty of bullshit alternative cures out there and it's good to question people. But pretending that the only cures that are valid are the ones from current mainstream medicine makes no sense. There is plenty of stuff out there mainstream medicine doesn't have a solution for and doesn't understand. In addition it has its own snake oil problems like unnecessary surgeries and feeding psychoactive substances to more and more people.

> because their observation doesn't fit with the mainstream

what do you mean by "mainstream"? Mainstream medicine?

This isn't pop-music aesthetics, medicine is a profession, and seeking alternate treatments can do real harm.

> I mentioned that meditation seems to help with my depression and anxiety

This is dissimilar to things like allergies. It's also worth noting how many thing do turn out to be BS - your example might be survivor bias.

> But pretending that the only cures that are valid

Its one thing to consider alternativecures, it's another to promote them. Some alternate treatments can be harmful, so there should be a high barrier to recommendation.

> There is plenty of stuff out there mainstream medicine doesn't have a solution

Doesn't mean alternative medicine does though. The same argument is made for religion, called "god of the gaps".

I am not saying that alternative medicines work better than mainstream medicine. All I am saying is that you can't immediately dismiss alternative medicine. There is a lot of nonsense going on but also a lot of useful stuff.

> All I am saying is that you can't immediately dismiss alternative medicine

dismiss in what sense? dismiss it as no more plausible than an infinite number of possible cures?

If you go to the trouble of mail-ordering an expensive pill, you are clearly giving its plausibility as a cure greater weight than, say, a mixture of ketchup and toothpaste baked at 200 degree for 20 mins - which also can't be dismissed as a cure.

> also a lot of useful stuff

How do you know?

You definitely can. Sick and weakened people in particular, are not likely to provide reliable evidence - they really, really want to believe that this time, it's going to work, after all.

I hope you will never have a difficult disease with diffuse symptoms and then be treated like that.

Treated like what? Not humored with harmful thoughts?

I think the real danger to life trumps ego.

Have you ever talked to someone with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia or chronic pain? They constantly get dismissed and treated as if they were imagining things.

Which is entirely different to dismissing Snake Oil, or alternative treatment.

Also, how do you know this?

I know this because I have taught yoga classes for years. There you tend to meet a lot of people who have tried to find help for their health issues and try yoga as a last resort. Unfortunately yoga isn't a cure for lots of people either.

But just listen to their stories. If you have something like autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, undiagnosed Lyme's disease or other stuff a lot of people including medical professionals will accuse you of lying and pretending. This goes on while it's very clear that people are suffering. Some people are lucky that eventually they get diagnosed with something that's in the textbooks like Lyme's but a lot of them don't and their life is miserable. It's miserable because of suffering but also because they get treated like pretenders.

You're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

If mainstream medicine doesn't work for someone, it doesn't mean the solution is voodoo or alternative shit, it's fixing the healthcare industry, not spending billions on goop.

Seems I didn't express myself precisely enough. I am not advocating jumping on every alternative cure. My comment was about people outright dismissing the guy who wrote that he got his hay fever controlled with supplements. Then they added comments that it would have gone anyway. In short, they dismissed someone's experience without listening any further which I think is wrong.

It's also wrong to reflexively dismiss any kind of treatment that's not in medical textbooks. See my comment about meditation. When I started meditating it had the the status of voodoo shit. But now they are coming around.

> Then they added comments that it would have gone anyway.

Can you quote/link that post?

> It's also wrong to reflexively dismiss any kind of treatment that's not in medical textbooks

Dismiss as definitely incorrect? Maybe. Defends on what it is.

Dismiss as unproven? Perfectly OK.

Here are some quotes from this page:

"Simply waiting 4-8 weeks treats the vast majority of common issues."

"You know hay fever is an allergy, right? And that you are allergic to specific pollen? These pollen are _seasonal_. It's not suprising that your symptoms are now gone, it's very probable that the allergen is just gone (for the season). The snake-oil has done nothing."

"For one, your issues could have healed by themselves, even without it, just through time passing. Since there's a sample of 1 of you, and you did take those drugs, we don't have a control group, and can't know."

Yeah, I read them.

These are alternate explanations your original post hadn't explicitly ruled out - are your claims not open to interrogation?

> they dismissed someone's experience

I believe I already stated this, but they seem to dismiss your conclusion, not your experience. Your experience is taking the supplement, then soon after experiencing no allergies. This is not contested.

These quotes are mostly reasonable since you had at that point omitted the fact of the period of time you had been suffering from hay-fever before trying the supplement. That fact still doesn't rule out these explanations, however, because of survivor bias - which I've also commented on.

> The snake-oil has done nothing

Even if we accept the supplements as the cause, The proposed mechanism is still not certain.

If the mechanism were such that any placebo, nutritional supplement, or change in diet would have had the same effect, I would still consider the product to be snake-oil.

Wait a minute. If the people you see seek yoga as a last resort for their dismissed symptoms, then there is a bias/filter in the data you see.

Without knowing how many people see a doctor with these symptoms, you can't make a generalisation like "most people [who see a doctor] are dismissed".

I never used the word "most". This seems to be the problem in this whole discussion. People throw a fit before they are finished reading.

Is that not what you were implying?:

> They constantly get dismissed

> If you have something like ... or other stuff a lot of people including medical professionals will accuse you of lying and pretending

> undiagnosed Lyme's disease

I dated someone who claimed to have this, and not only was she very involved with ILADS advocacy, she had the Wikipedia page on "Chronic Lyme disease" memorized:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease

Six doctors in a row, including an infectious disease research specialist, diagnosed her with fibromyalgia and recommended treatment, but she wasn't having any of it and kept cycling through doctors in between sleeping the entire day.

I was present in the room when she met one of them. He acknowledged her symptoms, expressed that all of them were strongly consistent with fibromyalgia, and offered to work with her to find a treatment protocol that met her very specific needs. She retorted that "[he was] wrong", and that it had to be due to her Lyme disease that she contracted four years ago. The doctor respectfully replied that the tests he had ordered and description of her symptoms did not support that conclusion, though he understood why she would connect the two (and even acknowledged the "community" of folks who feel that medicine is wrong on this -- he was aware). I watched the session descend into a complete lack of productivity and had to restrain myself from trying to mediate, because she got progressively more frustrated with him not playing ball.

Immediately after we left, she called her mom and told her another doctor had accused her of lying and making her disease up. I can see why she would conclude that, honestly, but it was nonetheless a twisting of the actual narrative. I get it, though: it can be difficult to alter your views or interpret normal interactions correctly when you're positively sure of something, despite it being explained to you as incorrect.

I have listened to her stories, and I've even watched the incidents at hand. Though I only observed one visit, I would bet that not a single medical professional has ever accused her of lying or pretending. They just did not accept her own self-diagnosis. There's a significant difference.

My sister has fibro and has gotten nothing but kind and patient care from her GP, the rheumatologists and psychologists she has seen. She did hear from one specialist the line that "it might well be psychosomatic", and it did cause her to bristle, but said specialist went on to say that people with depression (like my sister), anxiety, bipolar and other disorders often experience chronic fatigue and the like as manifestations of these issues. To treat the pain they're experiencing as a physiological failure could be dangerous. I wonder if a lot of patients interpret this perfectly reasonable diagnosis as "you're crazy, it's all in your head."

I really hope that if I do have a difficult disease with diffuse symptoms, the bullshit artists and "you should try a honey rub, it did wonders for my cousin's friend" crowd don't try to "help."

Of course you can. If somebody told you that they had a cold but that they cured it in only a week by applying banana peels to their eyelids and having a specialist apply precisely timed hammer blows to the top of their head, would you say, hmm, can't rule it out?

That's a ridiculous example.

Yes, the form of argument would be called reductio ad absurdum.

More ridiculous than declaring that you cured a seasonal allergy with food supplements and by sticking needles in your body?

Absolutely.

Why? Looks the same to me.

Edit: just to clarify why they look the same to me: they're both applying "treatments" which have no particular basis to think they'd affect things, to a problem which naturally goes away over time, and then later attributing the disappearance of the problem to the "treatment" rather than to the passage of time.

I think it's pretty well established that food has an impact on one's health. So it seems a reasonable assumption that supplements can also have an impact. Comparing that to hammer blows just shows that you are not willing to have a reasonable discussion but want to kill the argument.

Bananas are a food, and hammer blows to the head are well known to have health effects.

Right, because the argument is fallacious, which was the point of the example. We don't argue medicine from first principles in this century, by the way. Absent hard empirical evidence, you can speculate what you like, but Occam's Razor suggests natural healing or the placebo effect as being the most likely explanations. If you're just a fan of wild invention, you might find other reasons, but you're probably not going to convince many that wild invention must be taken seriously.

http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/features/beating-addic...

I think you have won this discussion :-)

I can't decide if that article is a point for you or for me, but either way I agree that it wins.

It's a win-win.

They don't dismiss your experience, they dismiss your conclusion.

poster doesn't claim to be in a position to judge, which is consistent with them not making any claims.

Yes and the past five years the season started in March and ended in September, for me. I didn't move or anything like that, so i have no reason to assume the pollen have suddenly disappeared in May this year.

Well, then you have a great opportunity for a control. Reverse some of the changes and see if your symptoms return. It should be pretty easy to determine what exactly made your symptoms disappear.

"The only difference between science and just screwing around is writing it down." -- Mythbusters

Yep, it is. And even when I do that people on the internet will call me stupid for believing in non-evidence-based medicine.

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