“Eat More Onions”: Desperate and massively debatable medical advice from 1918
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
For most of human history, we thought that germs were spread by certain odors. So to counteract them, we would often use aromas: this is why plague doctor masks had the horn which was filled with herbs.
EDIT: I meant diseases were thought to be spread by odors, as we didn't yet have a germ theory of disease.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/iceci/enforcementactions/warningletters/...
Another problem is that these herbal cures may work initially (through placebo effect or a real mechanism), and then stop working. However, at that point the word has already been spread. This is especially troubling in the internet age, where people post reviews after one day of trying something.
Not nitpicking (at least that's not my intent), just adding: Only if you know what the variables are.
This occurred to me because I'm myself an interesting medical case beating even a professor of medicine's prediction, as well as independent ones from various doctors about other things that turned out to be symptoms of the same underlying chronic poisoning issue that I had to diagnose myself, and only then find the right specialist for it. There has been sooo much interesting stuff going on in my body during years of slow recovery (and a few "miracles" that left doctors literally speechless), but I would not be able to say how you could repeat the "experiment". Too little is known about any of what goes on inside me right now, my doctor (researcher at university clinic) has long ago admitted that we left the area of known study-supported medicine behind.
I suspect a few mechanisms based on observing myself that I have no way and no idea how to prove. So I'm of course not certain what I can claim, or what exactly happened, but neither would I know how to repeat my personal experiment even if human experiments were possible. It's just too much unknown territory. And in the end my experiences will all be lost, unfortunately.
An example for something I suspect: Some diseases like the common cold may not always be orthogonal and superfluous. In my case, over the years, I got more and more the impression that it actively helped my body to get rid of what was stored over decades. I suspect that everything is much more intertwined and connected and not separate. One prediction I could make based on this suspicion is that if we were to be able to eliminate mild diseases like the cold completely we would get more serious diseases or other issues down the road. That's not a practical experiment though, maybe some large-scale observational studies can get some hints one way or the other, but it will be too messy and too uncertain for anything even close to a definite proof or disproof.
Another thing I suspect is that even very low level exposure (far below officially allowed levels) to heavy metals has very real consequences - it's just that on an individual basis we are almost utterly unable to show it. We can do it only on a population basis, and we all know how messy that is with all the known and unknown confounders.
"They spread the sickness throughout the world, each army bringing it to its respective country... and it was related by Christopher Columbus of his discoveries in the Occidental Indies to the King of Spain, that in the lands he discovered he encountered many Indian men and women who suffered from the disease of the morbo gallico [syphilis], and so those among the soldiers and men of arms who had communication with the Indian women and with the 'mulheres publicas' of the land easily spread this contagion to the greater part of the Spanish army, and from thence, to the French."
He comes pretty close to anticipating germ theory here, arguing that syphilis was sexually transmitted and correctly theorizing that it had New World origins and was spread by European colonization. These people weren't dumb.
It is interesting. It was terrible that early explorers carried diseases that killed millions in the regions they went to. Its reassuringly symmetric that diseases went the other way as well. I didn't know that 100k+ still die from it every year.
It's also possible that it coincidentally originated in Europe around the same time and spread to the Americas. By the time people started looking into where it had come from, it was widespread in both places and the exact origins were obscure. Nobody appears to have recorded the prevalence of syphilis in the Americas during the early years of European contact.
Yep, hence malaria (bad-air)
What else would you have done in their position? If you were the health authorities? Do nothing? At its heart, I think this issue is the same one as social science experiments being replicated with lower strength results: We naturally want to handle information as if the truth value is binary, as in mathematical logic and and IF ... THEN statements, true or false. Wouldn't that be wonderful and easy? When the information is imperfect, it seems like we feel justified in targeting our emotions at the offender, but they are doing the only thing they can - acting under uncertainty. Was telling people to eat onions a bad choice, given their choices, and in foresight?
As everyone knows from personal experience, if you are giving medical advice, doing scientific research, or making a decision for your startup, the information and possible conclusions are not like in the textbook - they are unclear and messy. You can't wait for the perfect stuff.
[0] Attributed to Voltaire
I would never want to be a politician.
- we live in a world of tradeoffs
- we live in a world of uncertainty
- order and trust are far more fragile than chaos and discord
This is not so when working with a constituency.
For similar reasons I look at 'politician' as a real, honorable professional with its own set of professional skills. First, you need to understand any issue that might cross your desk. Then, amidst the insanity of the political environment, you need to maintain your own clear vision, maintain a nuanced, up-to-date feel for your constituency's opinions and for the forces in the halls of power, triangulate and anticipate all of it in order to judge what is possible, and then have the skills to lead/nudge/guide/push/negotiate all those forces simultaneously in order to execute what you think is possible.
The trend of hiring outsiders for the job is absurd, IMO. Few things impress me more than a skilled politician at work (i.e., one who uses their skills to accomplish things).
In Indian cuisine it's used as an umami enhancer. Usually with turmeric in vegetable dishes - especially lentil curries like dal and sambar but also those based on potato and cauliflower.
Kashmiri cuisine famously uses it in Rogan Josh.
Other than increasing flatulence that is.
More carrots, not onions.
I currently live in the south of Morocco and this is exactly the kind of advice I am given here constantly. My SO went through months of dietary restrictions based on such advice; got her to hospital 2 weeks ago and today the lab results are in: bacterial infection. We are looking forward to the first proper dinner in a very long time.
My personal highlight on local advice I was given: "Keeping a tortoise in your house helps with asthma. My cousin has asthma and when it is really bad, he comes back to his parents' house and after a few days it is much better!" (That house is in a very small mountain village with very clean air, he lives in a very big city full of cars and he does not dare to smoke anywhere in his home village or his parents' house lest his parents see that.. go figure.)
That is just for rhinoviruses too, there are other viral reasons of common cold, more hardy than this, and bacterial diseases that mimic it very precisely.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030881461...