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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Right. The road to hell is paved with the good intentions (and myopia) of narrow specialists who want others to prioritize the thing they worry about. Technicians of all kinds need to realize their most helpful role is to provide inputs so people can make their own decisions, not to actually recommend (or recently mandate) what people decide to do.

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If you think of UV light exposure as a therapy of sorts, then it's fair to weigh its benefits and risks against alternative treatments.

If the supposed benefits of UV light exposure can be achieved through an alternative treatment that poses a lower risk of skin cancer, then why wouldn't that be the superior treatment?

Because real people like to go to the beach or go running or a million other outdoor activities. And some people even like the look of a tan, or want to show off their bodies. Or people don't want to spend their time thinking about that stuff and have other priorities. That is my point about the narrow advice. People have diverse goals, and there is a lot more to going out in the sun than optimizing your vitamin d levels. Treating people like we're all farm animals that need some standard, dictated care formula works for nobody

It sounds like your argument is now: "I like the look of being tanned and don't want to be burdened by the need to regularly apply lotion while living my outdoor lifestyle".

Okay, well that's your choice; but don't latch on to some argument about it being healthy, unless you're willing to endure scrutiny.

I laughed when the Dr in the article recommended sunscreen plus blood pressure pills. The confidence in narrow pharmaceutical interventions is absurd when we keep realizing that we don't understand how all the systems in the body are interconnected.

Especially given that the very first paragraph of the article says that most vitamin supplements appear to be ineffective.

Sure, the article does say that and it even provides a paper to backup its claim.

However, subsequently a meta-analysis (including that same paper) was published that found:

"Vitamin D [supplementation] was associated with significant reduction of cancer-related mortality compared with placebo [...]. Compared with placebo, Vitamin D was not associated with significant reduction of cancer incidence [...]".

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/20009666.2019.17...

He probably doesn't get out much.

I tried this approach. I love being outside, love the beach, love to run and when I was younger I loved having a nice bronze tan.

I am now a stage 4 melanoma patient. They have taken my lymph nodes on one side, a chunk of my brain, and half of my right lung. Immunotherapy has so far saved my life, but there are no guarantees this will last.

Careful. I sincerely hope it plays out better for you..

Those alternatives either work poorly (vitamin D supplementation) or have other side-effects (hypertension drugs). And, as noted in the article, sun exposure is a complex reaction with several benefits - it would take many drugs to reproduce that effect.

It’s reasonable to question the current dogma (no sun ever) and determine if there’s a better balance (~30 minutes without sunscreen, but use sunscreen beyond that, or some other mix). Dermatologists are focused on skin health and more likely to overlook or ignore those other benefits.

That is an entirely pointless hypothetical. The medical reality is that alternative treatments can only deliver a subset of the benefits of UV light exposure.

According to the article the alternative treatment is ineffective (vitamin D supplements) and increases risk factors for higher mortality rate diseases. I'd say that's pretty far from the superior treatment.

Recently mandating not coughing on others to stop a (initially scary) pandemic is not the same as recommending less sun exposure. The road to slippery slopes is itself a slippery slope.

Go tell your doctor You smoke two packs a day they’ll say stop smoking. If smoking two packs means you won’t kill yourself then they will weigh that. Then there are bad doctors too of course

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