Endemic pathogens are causing psychiatric illnesses and shortening lives
return.life
return.life
A lot of microbiome research is leading to particular bacteria in or missing from the gut being correlated with various diseases like diabetes and obesity and almost all chronic diseases have a corresponding microbiome adjustment. We don't know yet know if there is a cause here or its just correlated but its a potential diagnostic that shows long before more serious symptoms and could potentially be used diagnostically one day. Or it might be these shifts are causal and we need to find a way to restore gut function that works well and reliably.
The fundamental idea is becoming mainstream in research with significant labs working on this for Long Covid, ME/CFS as well as EDS across the globe. Its not a fringe idea in research looking at long neglected diseases and the more they look the more they find evidence for it. Its not something the vast majority of doctors would have any knowledge on today, most would consider it ridiculous despite thousands of papers on this topic with growing evidence for the fundamental idea of ongoing infections causing increasing problems.
Where did you get your information?
I'd suggest just sharing a good paper. Asking somebody where they got their information that something doesn't exist is pointless. You could say the same thing to somebody who doesn't believe unicorns exist; better to just show them a unicorn.
Someone on reddit keeps track of them all:
https://reddit.com/r/LongHaulResearch
also:
Viral infections sticking around has been known about for a very long time. Chronic infection of Hepatitis C for example occurs in about 80% of those infected and it can be asymptomatic for years while causing liver etc damage.
This includes many viral infections that the general public don’t realize stick around: “The causative agent for shingles is the varicella zoster virus (VZV) – a double-stranded DNA virus related to the herpes simplex virus. Most individuals are infected with this virus as children which causes an episode of chickenpox. The immune system eventually eliminates the virus from most locations, but it remains dormant (or latent) in the ganglia adjacent to the spinal cord (called the dorsal root ganglion) or the trigeminal ganglion in the base of the skull.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles
Typhoid marry is a famous example of this behavior occasionally extending to viruses that generally get cleared from the body.
That is, of course, after we did our own GI-MAP and took it to a doctor, not that a doctor would EVER suggest doing that. A naturopath? Yes they do it as a standard.
Standard doctors are operating on 1960's textbooks.
General practitioners refer people to specialists because nobody can keep up with every bit of new research out there. A doctor looking something unusual up isn’t a sign of incompetence but rather best practices.
Based on my extensive experience with doctors and the extensive experience of many others that I know they sure can.
That said you can read up on all the latest research for a condition because you don’t care about all the other research. Doctors can’t get away with such a limited focus.
Best doc I ever had was a naturopath. Unfortunately, he tired of dealing with insurance companies and moved to a retainer model with a limited number of patients. Why was he so much better than any other doc I've had? 1) he listened. Appointments were at least 45 minutes. Sometimes over an hour. When I go to an MD I'm lucky to get 10 minutes. 2) He tested. Annual blood tests were extensive (and, yes, could be expensive because of those insurance companies not wanting to cover a lot of stuff) 3) As he listened he was on his laptop pulling up relevant papers ("I was just reading a paper on this topic that came out a couple weeks ago") He'd print out the paper for you and highlight the relevant passages 4) He was interested - by that I mean, I never got the idea he was just going through the motions. He loved this stuff and nerded out on it.
DirectLabs is a reseller that has a physician on staff that approves your GI Map. So contact direct labs, order the kit, poop and vial it, drop it in the mail, wait 15-20 days. PDF of your results will be in your DirectLabs account online.
Since the process is so mechanical and so stats-driven, I think statistical computer models or even AI would do a much better job of it than your average doctor.
But due to the medical field being slow to utilize new methods, we don't see any of that yet, and the end result is far more people get false diagnoses than would otherwise. We can accept a human making a poor judgement sometimes, but we do not accept a machine doing the same, even if it's right more of the time.
More funding could help, but it’s just a hard problem.
I would suggest that a lot of medical questions are now answered by Dr. Google which implicitly does a lot of behavioral modeling / statistics in their machine learning and is already very successful.
>... Eight independent evaluators with special expertise in the management of meningitis compared MYCIN's choice of antimicrobials with the choices of nine human prescribers for ten test cases of meningitis. MYCIN received an acceptability rating of 65% by the evaluators; the corresponding ratings for acceptability of the regimen prescribed by the five faculty specialists ranged from 42.5% to 62.5%. The system never failed to cover a treatable pathogen while demonstrating efficiency in minimizing the number of antimicrobials prescribed.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/36660...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3666074
https://aimi.stanford.edu/events/bridging-ais-proof-concept-...
Microbiota engraftment from faecal transplants _is_ reliable - it brings along a raft of bacteriophages that clear a niche for the incoming colonies - unlike just slinging some probiotics down your neck and hoping some survive.
Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider? I’m not trying to troll by asking that question. I legitimately feel, as a patient of a large HMO, that the doctors I interact with aren’t very bright, making frequent mistakes about stuff they could google as quickly as they give out wrong information, but instead confidently insist upon something they’re misremembering or have never learned correctly in the first place. It feels like the profession has been optimizing for the wrong things: quick recall of a breadth of information rather than a scientific orientation towards the work. Perhaps I’m just seeing downstream effects of the reform of health economics in the last decade. Perhaps it’s elite overproduction. In any case reading the featured article, I’m just not at all optimistic about current medical practices experiencing any sort of kuhnian paradigm shift. They can’t even get the basics right, and seem prone to extreme group think bordering on religiosity.
I don't think they're becoming stupider, but I think the information age is making their errors more accessible and obvious to the general public.
I think this is an area where technology can help. The best primary care providers I've had have been the ones who aren't afraid to look things up as we're talking about them. I think better tools to aggregate the cutting edge of medical knowledge would help greatly.
Monday - Friday
- Wake up at 4:30 AM - Get to hospital by 5AM to start rounding on patients - Sometimes work inpatient all day sometimes clinic thrown in, but usually not done working until 7 PM, without even a 15 min break or a chance to eat a meal (15 hour day) - Come home and do about an hour of notes, 16 hour work day - At least once per week, wake up in the middle of the night to deliver a patient who asked for that kind of continuity of care. 24 hour work day
Saturday: - Wake up around 5am to be in by 6am to start the day - Work inpatient, usually without time for a 15min break for food, until 10AM SUNDAY (28-30 hours shift)
Repeat 49 weeks/year (days of 24/hr shift can vary and she usually gets one weekend off/month). Her average time at the hospital last year was 96 hours/week. She is not a resident.
How much confidence do you have that you'd be able to stay up-to-date in your field, or make recommendations that aren't ultra-standard, with this kind of schedule?
Worse yet, experienced people in these professions tend to defend the insane schedules, which I take for some sort of hazing ritual / Stockholm syndrome.
In the UK medical professionals are doing the sensible thing, and leaving the profession. I'm sure most of them would much rather stay, but they're making the rational choice as individuals.
That's not the best choice for patients as a group though.
There's a serious under-staffing, under-pay and conditions crisis.
>If you're so smart why are you poor?
Intelligence has nothing to do with power or leverage in a situation
But that’s what I was trying to suggest by saying that it seems the medical field, as a whole, seems to be optimizing for the wrong thing, viz. quantity over quality. As others note, there are clearly economic forces at play, and maybe too much constraint on the supply side. And it’s not clear to me that any reasonable discussion is occurring with respect to that. And so I reiterate my pessimism that we’ll somehow get from where we at currently, to a brighter future brought about by a kuhnian revolution as hinted at in the original article. We need to fix what’s broken before adding new features, to put it in software terms.
Honestly, that makes me agree with the parent comment that the medical profession must be getting stupider to not let a doctor take a break or eat a meal on a 15 hour day.
No, it's so the administrative staff can become further bloated as parasites upon the host of the actually productive doctors, and so the shareholders can take whatever breadcrumbs the administrative staff leaves behind.
Speaking for the US, as it has a notorious track record for inefficiencies in its medicinal industry: the USA is getting older (aging population needing more care) with the cost of medical school higher than ever. With this, the production of doctors is unlikely to increase at a pace necessary to maintain levels of care uniformly across the board (for example, rural vs city medicine capabilities vary massively based on region).
Most hospitals attempt to use technology to squeeze more out of their doctors, as getting more doctors isn’t cheap (because there aren’t enough of them). Hospitals can’t do much to solve the doctor production shortage - that involves legislative changes and the American Medical Association (lobbying arm).
The capitalistic effects will compound all of this - but not so much in what you may be describing. If we don’t resolve things, in the medium-term future years we can see a bifurcation in medicine as we see in criminal defense law - the wealthy will have great access to world class healthcare, paid at an extreme premium, and everyone else will be out of luck. (Some would say we are already here there or rapidly approaching this state).
This leads to higher pay and more work.
A large chunk of their membership is just medical students and residents but thats primarily because they offer good savings to them like study materials.
The AMA does not represent physicians.
That’s in no way bad money, but per hour worked PAs and many nurses make more than that. When I worked IT support I was paid close to that. It doesn’t at all seem worth the pain.
but to your point, studies have shown that handoffs kill patients. if you've got 18 people on a floor, each shift you hand off to has a statistically significant chance of screwing up one of them. So if there are 3 shift changes a day there are potentially 3 might-screw-you-up-bad rolls of the dice.
putting people on 12- or 24-hour sifts is crazy, but the sleep deprivation kills less than the shift change mistakes.
>Are doctors, as a group, becoming stupider?
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to share this.
Unless the schedule was always like this. Then it wouldn’t explain them getting stupider.
I think this quote really sums up this issue, and it's history:
Knowledge isn’t a commodity, especially not a fungible commodity, as the medical business sees it. Consciousness and culture are part of the life process. It is exactly the commoditization of medical knowledge that makes it dangerous, and generally stupid. Doctors buy their knowledge, and then resell it over and over; it’s valuable as a commodity, so its value has to be protected by the equivalent of a copyright, the system of laws establishing the profession. Without its special status, its worthlessness would be quickly demonstrated. When A.C. Guyton wrote his textbook of medical physiology (the most widely used text in the world) in the 1950s, it was trash; as it was studied and applied by generations of physicians, it was still trash. The most compliant patients who bought their treatment from the most authoritative, Guytonesque, doctors were buying their own disability and death.
Each time you learn something, your consciousness becomes something different, and the questions you ask will be different; you don’t know what the next appropriate question will be when you haven’t assimilated the earlier answers. Until you see something as the answer to an urgent question, you can’t see that it has any value. The unexpected can’t be a commodity. When people buy professional knowledge they get what they pay for, a commodity in a system that sustains ignorance.
-Ray Peat [1]
[1] https://raypeatinsight.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/raypeat-inte...
That said, if I had to do that 20x per day with only 20 minutes allotted per patient, I can’t imagine I’d be very good at diagnosis either.
My feeling is they are hiding behind the "I'm the expert here" thing because they are actually self conscious about how little they know, and are worried it will show if they engage in a discussion.
Scientists/researchers advance the state of our medical knowledge and doctors, over subsequent generations, absorb what they find and practices slowly change. But there’s always a lag. What we need to get past is the notion that doctors are some font of truth when it comes to medical information. They are, largely, a snapshot of what was conventionally believed at the time they graduated med school. We don’t have a system that effectively updates their knowledge or keeps them in the loop for cutting-edge research. They do learn a set of first principles that can help them reason about novel situations better than a lay person, but only if the right answer is one that follows from those principles as opposed to being counterintuitive.
It’s the nature of being a practitioner rather than a researcher.
That's not true... generally, in order to practice doctors must be licensed, and in order to keep their license they must have annual continuing education. Generally accomplished by attending conferences where the latest research results are presented.
The details vary but the system does exist.
I think patients are getting smarter, and conditions for doctors are worse causing some intelligent people to choose different fields. That said, I recently went through a major illness and interacted with many medical professionals. My first hand experience/anecdata is that doctors are just like every other professional. Some are good, some are mediocre. Some are so consumed by hubris they believe the public is always wrong, and Some are willing to talk things through and keep an open mind about everything, even if it is ridiculous.
The best thing we could do for healthcare is to remove the idea that "doctor knows best." While it is important for doctors to feel confident, and to teach the public to avoid snakeoil, it just places unreal expectations on these people. If patients took more accountability for their own health, then we could loosen some of the malpractice laws, and doctors insurance premiums would go down, and that would in turn cause rates to go down. But that was a bit of a tangent from my point that doctors are just people, maybe with an average intelligence that is slightly above the population at large, but still just people.
Sure, but outside of surgeons and the ER, most doctors are not making life or death decisions all too often. Your average family medicine doctor should always be presenting multiple options for care, and be honest with the patient and themselves that they may be wrong about the diagnosis. I know some people dislike so-called weasel words, but doctors should be using them regularly.
One of them, who was the shoulder specialist ironically (he should have nailed the diagnosis as TOS), looked at my hand X-Rays, said there is no arthritis, then did a test on me to that I said hurt, and then diagnosed me with arthritis. I’m 27. It borders on malpractice and at the very least should be considered gross negligence.
And they were all in a big hurry. I had to stop all of them on their way out of the examination room to ask my questions!
I’ll add that all three ortho docs did those “provocative tests” for CTS, like bending my wrists, and NONE made my symptoms worse. This alone should have been an indicator that the nerve impingement was happening closer to the spine. Meanwhile, the provocative tests for TOS almost immediately and drastically worsened my symptoms.
Sort of like how I would be surprised if I interviewed a developer who didn't know what an array was.
None of the surgeons or neurologist did Eden’s or Adson’s or any other TOS test. I didn’t learn about TOS until the third doc, but she immediately dismissed it because “TOS is very rare” and “it would have shown on the nerve conduction study”- though the NCS wasn’t done above my elbow, and anyway studies out there say NCS only shows nerve damage, not so much nerve impingement.
I googled my symptoms for months, and only found TOS after exhausting literally every other nerve impingement disorder from the hand to the spine. Google results are very prejudiced to carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis.
I’d heard stories from people who would go to various doctors and say they were all quacks. I always thought “hey, these guys went to MEDICAL SCHOOL, what do you know about any of this stuff?”, but now I’m more in their camp.
Anyway… Good posture is very important fellas! Having ergonomic everything doesn’t matter if your posture is poor.
1. Doctors are not the same are researchers in many or most cases. They are more akin to technicians than scientists. In the same way I wouldn't expect my electrician to meaningfully innovate the way that he hooks up my house to the power grid or I wouldn't expect my plumber to fundamentally shift my city's sewer system to better serve my individual house that simply isn't their job as front line folks administering care.
2. I think we are massively overlooking simply the breadth and depth of the changes in the world and how that affects their profession. We are exposed to a staggering and exponentially increasing amount of chemicals, environmental toxins, pollutants, foods, and their patients come from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds and live in wildly different environments with wildly different lifestyles. I have to imagine 100 years ago if you were a doctor in say Ireland, you mostly knew what your patients did for work, what they ate, they all lived in roughly the same area, etc. The variables of health were simply much less.
3. The same time the amount of diseases / disorders / etc. that we've identified has grown exponentially. When the field of things that it could be even if that was an incomplete list (obviously) it was much easier to give a broad diagnosis than a specific one. This has improved treatment to be sure but also demanded specialization so any one doctor having all the answers gets less likely over time.
4. Lastly it's just financial pressures. Markets and especially insurance is part of this but I think in general as globalization has continued to accelerate and resources are being distributed more and more in some sense (and concentrated in other senses) you have to take a holistic view. You say doctors used to be "better" but better where? If all the doctors are in a handful of countries with most of the resources that sub group of people will yes get better care but what about everyone else?
People do stupid things! I observe and wonder how can call us intelligent species! For example, I see the following scenarios:
- only some people in a family wear masks in a closed space.
- people wear a mask inside but take it off to eat or sometimes talk to others.
- people talk in each other face outside, but wear masks inside.
- people wear surgical masks without any certification (such as ASTM) and wear the same masks for days (you can tell from how dirty their masks are) - not only they are not protected from COVID-19, but they can bring bacteria, fungi, and microplastics straight into their lungs!
I do not participate in circuses - if I do something, I do it properly, and in a meaningful way! XBB.1.5 is as contagious as measles, i.e. it's the most infectious virus known to science! And new variants could go beyond the r0 of measles soon (r0 has only being going up so far)! You cannot act the same way as this is the flu with a much lower basic reproductive number, which is very-well studied, has decent antivirals, yet still kills a lot of people and costs trillion dollars to the global economy each year!
The issue is, the system is incredibly complex with a lot of non-linear interaction that are difficult to understand or even see happening.
That means that by cell count, you are more bacteria than human.
Are there even accurate tests for many of these? Take long Covid as a modern challenge. Most people already have antibodies of some kind and a fraction still struggle with mental challenges post infection that repurposed SSRIs can significantly help with. Just the other day there was even an article about people being overprescribed SSRIs.
If I were to summarize the article in a few words it would be:
Stress caused by pathogens can lead to chronic illness.
You can say the same about most stresses in life too though and their similar correlations as made in this article.
Also worth mentioning this was lifted and edited off another blog that has since gone down.
It links to published studies on each of these links.
Coxsackievirus B4, Herpesvirus 6, Enteroviruses, and Cytomegalovirus have all been linked to type 1 diabetes and pancreatic failure.
EBV, however, has been identified as a strong precursor for MS. Due to difficulty in conducting studies on viruses, research in this area has been limited, but recent interest in auto-immune disorders caused by COVID has led to renewed funding.
mRNA-based vaccines are also being tested for auto-immune diseases thought to have viral causes.
Its most severe central neurological manifestation is herpes encephalitis.
How do you know this article was lifted off another blog?
That blog, in turn, generates a warning because it is presenting a ghost.io certificate.
The author name appears here https://return.life/category/views/page/5/
Basically: “here’s my idea that might sound crazy, but there might be some reasons to explore it in more depth”.
The attitude that “it goes against the grain so I won’t even consider it” seems problematic though when the subject is one that we still know very little about.
Step 2. Give me money
A tale as old as time…
Apply this response to a group raising concerns about the safety of asbestos and seeking funding for research to validate or debunk those concerns.
People fear disease because of its impact on wellbeing and life expectancy.
Not all fear is warranted or healthy, but fear also drives action and is an evolutionary advantage. There’s a good reason to stop smoking, because one hopes to avoid a painful death via lung cancer.
“Lock your doors, or risk invasion and bodily harm by local street gangs” is an appeal to fear, and sound advice depending on your neighborhood.
Fear can obviously be weaponized/misused, but not all fear-based arguments are inherently so.
With all of that said, I didn’t really see fear mongering in this article. Instead, potentially sobering thoughts.
The article starts with:
> Endemic Pathogens are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You. Nobody warned you about them, but they’re destroying your mind and they’re everywhere.
Maybe we have significantly different perspectives on fear mongering, but that’s archetypal fear mongering in my book. The article then goes on to summarise a number of fringe scientific theories that are not substantially supported by evidence, including linking autism to vaccines. The article then concludes with a call to action to help philanthropically fund the industry in which the author works as a venture capitalist (and don’t see any disclosure about this conflict of interest in the article).
If the article left you feeling soberly thoughtful, then perhaps you could make a donation to the author’s next funding round. But from my perspective “be afraid, give me money” seems like a perfectly reasonable summary.
Sensationalizing fear by presenting existing niche knowledge as an elevated concern for day to day living. This is why it's sometimes referred to as fear-mongering.
eg: Did you know how lethal drinking water can be? Simply drinking water has killed plenty of people in modern times. Click here to know more.
Shock media, like most phrases, is an amalgamation of ideas. In this case, "Shock Jock" and Media. The implication is that it's not purely click-bait and the point of the media is not purely informational.
as of now, i just assume most of these are not a big deal and written in bad faith and ignore then entirely, but i’d prefer not to miss important information if there’s an actionable change i should make in my life, and i would really prefer to be able to read interesting content without being bombarded by garbage.
That would be... the NY Times? NEJM?
NEJM is a lot more broad than what i would want to see, i'm not really interested in keeping tabs on the entire field of medicine. i just want to hear about what affects me- "a pandemic is sweeping the world" or "RSV cases that affect your child's age group are sharply on the rise" are examples.
what i want is specific which is why i would be willing to pay for a service that accommodates it
With that said, I find the author’s argument for epistemological anarchism overly simplistic.
Yes, many big breakthroughs came from discarding mainstream schools of thought. But the era in which those discoveries occurred was an era where many of our ideas about the world were fundamentally wrong. As knowledge increases and our models of the world improve, such anarchism becomes harder and harder to distinguish from quackery.
I suspect the author would point out that we might still be fundamentally wrong, but there is plenty of evidence to show that at least in some categories, we’re getting more things right than we used to. Whether the subject at hand is one of those areas is certainly debatable.
The point I can concede is that we still know so little about mental health and the impact of biology on mental health, that this may still be a discipline that needs some of that anarchism.
Recent studies linking gut bacteria to wellbeing at least hint at some potential legitimacy.
However, as the author pointed out, it's super hard to study. And with all the problems of the world, the ones that are almost impossible to study don't get studied.
But the question is if we need these studies anyway. Maybe some of the latent infections don't cause as many issues as others, but we've gathered enough knowledge at this point that we should suspect all of them.
A much better point is the one about vaccines. HPV is a prime example. It is already reducing cancer rates for boys and girls (one of the few cases where medicine ignored men - to much detriment, because a whole generation of boys could have been vaccinated already and they get cancer and spread it, too).
We should put funding into getting rid of as many of these latent infections as possible. We desperately need Epstein-Barr, HSV-1, HSV-2, and Herpes Zoster vaccines.
Making vaccines isn't anarchism to overthrow the medical establishment. Instead the problem is how funding gets allocated because the proof we have is less strong, but looking at all of the latent infections, the proof is plenty, we don't need those hard-to-do studies. Instead we need to start fighting these disease.
The way you tell "epistemologically anarchist theories" from quackery is the same way you tell any other theories from quackery: you test them.
We know vaccines aren't the cause, because large-scale studies have been done that show that autism rates aren't higher in vaccinated children. This leaves us with basically every other possible cause, including not just better diagnostics (I personally find that explanation highly plausible), but also changes in nutrition, effects of some sort of virus, pollution, microplastics and everything else under the sun that's changed in the last decades.
(Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?)
It's been decades; the kids are the study. Also, they're no longer kids. Do people who have taken the vaccines report higher rates of autism? It would be relatively simple to check for that.
> Did you have any idea other than "anything but the vaccines"?
Increased awareness of autism, increased medical attention on kids at large, increased medicalization of societal deviance, less socialization, less parental time, environmental factors (more CO2, more exposure to pollutants, more exposure to forever chemicals), dietary factors (more sugar, more carbs, more fat, microplastics), derived factors from any of the above (more screen time, earlier occurence of obesity and diabetes, higher prevalence and normalization of societal deviance).
All of those are as likely as vaccines; which is to say, extremely unlikely. We can test for them. Or we can keep testing this one thing we've already tested for, over and over, until as statistically expected, a study eventually happens to agree with your preconceptions about vaccines, proving the all-encompassing conspiracy of $cienti$t$ and $tati$tic$ and error margin$, and plunging us into another two decades of unvaccinated idiocy.
Tonnes of reasons. Parents being older before having children, spending your life surrounded by biologically active plastics (Hello, BPA, and its yet-to-be-banned cousins), changes in diet, Jupiter being in retrograde, etc, etc, etc.
Any one of them, even the wild-ass nonsense ones seem more plausible to me than one fraudulent study written by a doctor who wrote it in order to... Sell autism testing kits and litigation.
You should put less trust in proven, shameless liars, who have a simple explanation for all that ails you, that they will sell you a cure for.
It's not religious faith, but you're going to need a lot more than a shoddy argument.
The argument, by the way, is so shoddy (by failing to be rigorous about both diagnosis methodology, and of differences in environment) that we could trivially use it to conclude that vaccines actually reduce incidences of autism, if we look at America as the undertreated high-autism, under-vaccinated baseline, and at Europe as the properly treated gold-standard... But I don't think that's what you're interested in exploring, no?
There may be a reason why this question attracts so many frauds, quacks, and fools. I postulate: the people who run well-made studies, that we can actually draw meaningful conclusions from aren't finding the answers that the frauds, quacks and fools like.
I did not mean to imply that we no longer live in a world where many ideas are wrong, just a world where we’ve gotten a hell of a lot more right than the era in question. My issue was more with the claim that the success of “epistemological anarchism” of the past was a sufficient reason to justify it presently, with no acknowledgement of the major shift in the landscape that has occurred as a result of those breakthroughs and continuing progress.
I say all of this while still finding the ideas presented to be interesting, especially in light of others emerging research.
I just think the anarchism angle didn’t help the content much.
In areas that are sufficiently understood, such deviations should become increasingly rare. That doesn’t mean there is no room for this - there certainly is!
> The way you tell "epistemologically anarchist theories" from quackery is the same way you tell any other theories from quackery: you test them.
The problem here is not one of testing, but convincing someone that an idea is worth the $$$ required to carry out that testing.
It’s impossible to test every form of quackery, which puts the modern “anarchist” in a difficult position.
These are musings about the challenges presented, not conclusions about the state of things.
This is terrifying.
While doing that go outside get fresh air, exercise and sunshine. Also, take some Vitamin D.
This is quite a presumption! The advocates of neurodiversity that I’ve seen care less about where these things come from, and more about how they are thought of in society. So what if it’s caused by a pathogen?
Worrying will never solve any of this. Worrying is futile and immobilizing at its extreme. Be happy, live life and get plenty of Vitamin D.There's no need for funding a new foundation (run by neophytes?). The funding system for health and infectious diseases in particular is pretty good in terms of funneling money to researchers with actual prospects of advancing what we know.
Here's the thing: once you're old, or your immune system is compromised (inactive or over-active), the bevy of mechanisms to Keep Things Going itself fails, and then it's mostly a matter of time. Because failures can happen for so many reasons and in so many ways, findings in this context will always be promising, rarely definitive, and almost never helpful.
Take EBV and MS. Epidemiologically, EBV is highly prevalent - say 95+% of adults show antibodies, and the rest are likely just not producing enough to detect. So the recent VA study had to start from a base of millions to find a few hundred case/controls and a risk factor of ~37X, with only one patient who developed MS not having demonstrated EBV antibodies. Then analytically, e.g., folks at Stanford have found an EBV antibody that also binds to a protein at the foot of the myelin. Thus, we seem to have a perfect exemplar of auto-immune molecular mimickry.
Case closed? Well, you're not going to get rid of EBV soon (a vaccine from ~2000 was abandoned, but Moderna is trialing another). Also, there are many lines of evidence that neurodegeneration starts before the myelin-attacking flares (and the myelin protein at issue is not normally exposed to antibodies). So while the auto-immunity may be excessive and amplify the problem, it's only responding to the neurodegeneration. But we already knew that because even the B-cell ablating therapies for MS only delay disability.
So while there's more science behind this discussion than the typical anti-vaxxer's, it's one of the areas that has the highest ratios of valid, narrow findings to actionable medicine: auto-immunity, gut microbiomes, neuropathic pain, etc. Whenever the problems are systemic, you get some benefit from a system reset or dampening (colon cleanses, inflammation reduction), but that's a bit like rebooting the system as a cure for the blue screen.
tl;dr: Give us money or die.