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Comment by smurda | Hacker News Reader

“We use the word ‘inflammation’ colloquially, as if we understand what we are saying. But dig a little deeper and the word becomes a clown car of meanings. Is it the chronic irritation of an autoimmune disease? The lingering residue of a postviral syndrome? A nonhealing wound?”

Good description of a generic catch-all term that could have a variety of specific meanings.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/all-the-carcin...

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A lot of medical terms have been hijacked by influencers, including some influencer doctors.

“Dopamine” is the other big offender. So many social media doctors and influencers building huge podcast followings with “dopamine” babble. Huberman is one of the worst offenders, but he seems to slip past a lot of people’s filters because he’s a doctor and he mixes actual studies into his extremely long podcasts so that people assume everything he’s saying is accurate.

I don't understand this comment at all. Huberman, to me, has provided the most nuanced understanding of dopamine and dopaminergic effects accessible to the broader public. There's a lot of clickbait around him, and no doubt many "influencer doctors" who make a bad name for themselves, but this is a very clear take on dopamine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU. I wouldn't call it babble.

(Huberman is also not a physician, but a PhD, which is an important distinction.)

I hear people talk shit about him much more than I hear reasoned criticism of what he says.

The worst thing ive seen him do is cite studies with low p values while mentioning it. The horror.

Why cite a useless study? Because it serves his purpose maybe?

I don't know about anybody else but if $lowcostbehavior has a small chance of leading to $goodoutcome I still wouldn't mind hearing about it.

I've tried multiple things he mentioned which haven't worked which also didn't cost me anything.

>I don't know about anybody else but if $lowcostbehavior has a small chance of leading to $goodoutcome I still wouldn't mind hearing about it

This has traditionally been the excuse of quacks

>I've tried multiple things he mentioned which haven't worked which also didn't cost me anything.

And this is "throw things on a wall and see what sticks".

It's ok if you're doing research (even there though it should be tamed as an approach) but it's not OK when giving medical and health lifestyle advice.

>This has traditionally been the excuse of quacks

Not really. Quacks usually try to sell you profitable remedies that have no chance of working and only cite scientific research in order to be misleading.

This made me realize: What if you listening to his talks/podcasts/videos is the thing he's selling you?

What if his product/remedie is just the "content" he produces. Not much different to a quack then.

He seems to get paid for promoting stuff like blood tests and some supplement company. I tend to ignore that stuff as I ignore all adverts but I would be reluctant to assume that he's selling quack medicine this way.

Some people do seem to assume that since he's getting paid to promote supplements, that those supplements are basically another herbalife. I haven't seen anybody give any evidence for this though.

That's exactly the thing he's selling.

That's their regular selling tactic. But their excuse when they're called for selling snakeoil and bullshit health regimens. Then it's: "it works for some", "doesn't hurt to try", "better that not taking anything", "at least it gives people hope".

In this case he doesn't sell snakeoil directly: he sells talking about remedies and regimens for YT eyeballs and popularity (which can be turned into money indirectly).

>That's their regular selling tactic. But their excuse when they're called for selling snakeoil and bullshit health regimens. Then it's: "it works for some", "doesn't hurt to try", "better that not taking anything", "at least it gives people hope".

I seem to recall listening to a podcast where he cited a study that wasn't very conclusive and he said that it wasn't very conclusive.

So no. No it is not.

>In this case he doesn't sell snakeoil directly

If I had a dollar for every person who told me that he's selling snake oil without giving a clear example I'd be able to set up my own version of herbalife.

I really find it weird how many people despise him for really vague reasons. Like, why? He's pushing scientific studies. There is nuance. Not everything is expected to work. Not every study that shows something interesting has a high p value. He says all this. Quacks dont.

On an individual basis, there's nothing wrong with "throw things on a wall and see what sticks" as long as those things are low cost and low risk. For a lot of this stuff there is no high-quality research available (and probably never will be) so you just have to do your own informal n=1 experiments to see what works for you: not truly scientific but good enough. Andrew Huberman has always been clear about which protocols are actually supported by high-quality evidence and which are just speculative.

Boy you fellas sure know how to talk a guy up!

His long-form podcasts and interviews get hijacked into little snippets and "motivational" youtube videos. There is a huge industry of "recycling" channels that only do that, even more so now with shorts. So his 2h+ talk about morning routine studies or whatever gets turned into a video called "Neuro Expert's 21-step Morning Routine to live into your 90's". It becomes 4minutes, has peppy music in the background, can be distilled into a 30s short with effort. His channel gets points or money or whatever for you watching it, the recycling channel gets money for making it, and you as the viewer get stuck with the shit-end of the stick.

That's not even mentioning the "rebuttal" industry that'll create content criticising or rebutting his content, which gets recycled the same way. It's elephants all the way down, and our attention is sucked up by it.

I couldn't block and ignore these channels quickly enough, and no matter what I did YT kept recommending them. So glad I'm off YT.

Would love to watch/read any sources to better educate myself about things you believe Huberman gets wrong.

Blah blah blah Protocol blah blah blah Athletic Greens blah blah

And for some reason apple cider vinegar is always the cure-all

I have pity for those who fall for Huberman. Listening to him for 30 minutes was enough to unsub him again. Low signal noise ratio, and a lot of excited talk about almost nothing. What a shill!

What podcasts / sites / sources do you enjoy?

Hijacking this comment to ask about Bryan Johnson. Anyone have any good criticism of his blueprint. The amount of supplements he takes seem really extreme. Talking about this btw: https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/

Ah Bryan Johnson, the guy who claims his body is clinically 18 while having the outward appearance of his actual age (46). When you Google "Bryan Johnson" it autocorrects to "Bryan Johnson creepy".

The issue with the Huberman Lab is, like others mentioned below, his content gets digested and then repackaged by a lot of micro-influencers all ofer the place, with short summaries that present bits and pieces of his podcast as solutions to everything. I started listening to his episodes from the first one, and it crazy to see what he actually discusses and how he presents things and then see what the internet makes of it. My girlfriend told me some weeks ago about that "Doberman" guy that I listen to, from a reel she saw somewhere about how he takes cold showers in the morning, and it's funny because in his podcast he clearly said he doesn't like or do cold showers, and he only presented that as an option based on some studies. He seems very down to earth and never promises things or presents solutions, you can see his academic background, but what the internet has done with his podcast and remixing his content is insane.

"I love doing ** because it gives me a dopamine hit!" — so annoying.

Here's what dopamine does, in very simplistic words, from a dopamine connoisseur (i.e. ADHD person): it tells your brain "hey, this is important, carry on!". It's not responsible for the pleasure, it's just motivates you to continue doing a thing.

Dopamine is when you're hungry, and tremble in excitement before your first bite of a hot pizza. Dopamine is the thrill of the chase.

> excitement before your first bite of a hot pizza.

What chemical is responsible for the inevitable disappointment?

Most likely a lack of seretonin response. I'm ignoring the "pizza mouth" aspect, since that is your pain nerve receptors, but the "yes, this is good" neurotransmitter is Serotonin.

Usually oil in case of a sad, wet pizza...

Gluten.

As in, I tremble with excitement just to rediscover that, after all, I'm still sensitive to gluten and in a few hours I'm going to need a bathroom. The best part of pizza is everything before that first bite and the crushing realization that I should've gone for a steak instead.

I’m very tired of people using clinical-sounding terms to describe their felt, first-person, lived experiences when it adds no preciseness—which should be the whole point of using such terminology.

Many people on social media use the word inflammation as if they're describing a root cause that they have control over, such as dietary cholesterol or exercise. But my understanding of this word is that inflammation is a symptom– an indirect result of any number of other factors.

Inflammation is just an activation of the immune defense system - the swelling is entirely intentional and healthy. What is annoying the immune defense system is the problem, and can in some cases be caused by a bug in the system (auto-immune disease).

Erroneously attributing correlation as causation is a common mistake. Blood cholesterol - entirely distinct from dietary cholesterol - was also commonly completely misunderstood as a cause, even though it like inflammation is a healthy and necessary response turned into a symptom...

The "Declownification" of medical diagnoses has continued for a long time. I met a medical historian giving a tour of the apothecary shop in Colonial Williamsburg who described how "consumption" was a clown car of tuberculosis, lung cancer, black lung (from mining), and a host of other lung ailments.

Over time each was identified as something unique, given a more precise name and treatment methods and eventually nobody is diagnosed with "consumption" anymore.

We still see much of the same thing going on today with many syndromes which are largely collections of symptoms with no definitive diagnostic test: depression, leaky gut, chronic fatigue, long COVID, etc. In many cases the symptoms probably aren't just psychosomatic and there is some underlying pathology but the root causes are unclear and we're probably inappropriately bundling multiple distinct conditions together.

It's a bit like asking "Is disease the source of illness?"

There is an industry that tries to mask and treat the symptoms without treating the cause of the symptoms.

Such sociopathically managed activity incentives the masking with long treatments for life, that gradually degrade other properly functioning systems (with over time require additional masking treatments, in loop).

So every time I read about symptoms without investigating what causes the triggering of such symptoms, I assume it is promoting that criminal but legal activity.

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