"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.
Neither are you. You can't just dismiss someone's experience as bullshit.
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.
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.
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 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.
PS: And no I would not take those odds even though it may have helped, there are odds vastly below 1%.
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 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.
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".
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?
poster doesn't claim to be in a position to judge, which is consistent with them not making any claims.
I think the real danger to life trumps ego.
Also, how do you know this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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".
> 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
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.