Hacker News Reader

Comment by grayhatter | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I often find my self ignoring the advice of experts too. Natural things like homeopathy are clearly superior.

This is such a trash take; and the shear number of people parroting it leads to a lot of needless suffering.

It’s a shit take for edge cases, but actually on point for the vast, vast majority of us. We have an awful and absurd habit of denying simple truths in homage to very exceptional cases. It’s a convenient reason for most to do less.

We have really high quality studies pointing out that things like fixing your sleep and going to the gym outperform other interventions in, key word here, healthy individuals.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30627769/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4896469/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26271496/

Exercising, eating right, and getting outside might or might not do for people what Ritalin does, but it’s not accurate to conflate Babelthuap’s prescription with homeopathy. It’s also not accurate to call homeopathy natural. I think it’s better classed as a folk belief not backed by science or any sort of evidence, like astrology.

I call the "just eat healthy and exercise" tips as "fuck off advice". As in, something you'll say to a person with a problem, and then that person will go and try it, and struggle at it, and fail at it - but the process will take them half a year, during which you don't have to deal with their whining anymore, and they'll blame their own lack of discipline in the end.

Homeopathy may be no more effective than a placebo - but placebos can work pretty well! In this day and age, when patients often aren't satisfied until the doctor gives them a prescription, a "worthless" placebo may be superior to unneeded antibiotics, or other drug with bad side effects.

Homeopathy is not any more or less natural than other pharmacy.

He must have edited the post you're responding too.

He no longer suggests homeopathy or ignoring reality.

Almost every expert recommends better diet, exercise and sleep, so I’m not sure why you’re viewing the “go natural” statement as a necessarily anti-expert one.

For some people better diet, exercise, and sleep require taking drugs to make it more likely they can even do those things. It's a dumb take.

and those are the very exceptions the parent allows for.

It's "fuck off advice". They recommend it in full knowledge that almost nobody ever sticks to it, but it keeps the advice receiver busy and feeling responsible for their own problem.

Lifestyle change is hard and impractical even for most neurotypical people. With untreated ADHD, it's almost impossible.

Likely for the same reason why prescriptions are so popular. It is way easier to down a pill then to workout, changing your eating habits, or adjusting your lifestyle to allow for more sleep. Changing habits is hard, eating meds relatively easy... "So off we go, and man, if someone interferes with our narrative, we attack like the speedfreaks we have become..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com