Please don't do this. It's a great way to get urushiol poisoning of your GI tract.
It's not exactly a _toxin_, just sometimes trigger allergic reactions.
I can’t condone it but I can’t rule out that some variant of this might work.
The reaction to urushiol is an allergic reaction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urushiol
and a vaccine is under development
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDC-APB
Some people just don’t react to it while others do.
I had hay fever as a kid which developed into asthma in my 30s, I had immune therapy from a specialist who gave me increasingly concentrated shots of allergens weekly for years. After a while my asthma went into remission and I quit taking medicine for it. I still have hay fever symptoms some times but they aren’t too bad and I rarely medicate for them because I get side effects even from some of the “non-drowsy” antihistamines.
Even though it is done under medical supervision, it is a controversial treatment. It’s banned in the U.K. They’d have me sit around the office for 30 minutes in case I had a bad reaction which they could usually treat with an injection of epinephrine but could be lethal if somebody was really unlucky.
Note there is at least one report of treatment of poison ivy sensitivity this way
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(09)01972-1/ful...
The thing is I got a treatment from my doc which was somewhat evidence based, compare that to all the bizzaro ideas circulating such as Edgar Cayce’s idea that you could treat hay fever with an alcohol tincture of ragweed. (Got that from a herbalist once, it does seem harmless)
Edit: OK, not quite. The Japanese lacquer tree was used which produces the same "active" substance which is what slowly kills you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicodendron_vernicifluum
Again, not quite: starvation by not eating normal food is what kills you.
Urushiol is non-toxic at even massive doses; but vanishingly small doses will provoke painful/itchy allergic reactions in many people.
I must be overly sensitive or have a deficient BBB because 10 mg loratadine transform me into a lethargic zombie for about 48 hours while providing minimal relief. A double dose of vyvaanse and a few coffees are not enough to bring me out of that state.
Experience with those others makes me wary of using Allegra except when my allergy symptoms are really bad.
BTW: Benadryl (Diphenhydramine), which has the same ingredient in the same dose marketed as a sleep aid, is really good for Poison Ivy because of its ability to penetrate into tissues really well. 30 years ago you would get a prescription for a round of steroid pills that will have you feeling pretty messed up for a week if you got Poison Ivy but today you are likely to be told to go to the pharmacy and treat yourself with OTC pills. Poison Ivy is bad enough that most people will take the drowsiness.
Joe Rogan isn't the best source of medical advice, but he has been smeared by the media on behalf of big pharma. His approach to treating COVID came from a doctor and was not "horse paste"... CNN was proven to have edited video of Joe Rogan to make his skin look off-color. Also, never forget that the mainstream media said the "vaccines" would stop transmission of the virus when all the experts knew it wouldn't do so, from the start. They also lied about side effects.
Science doesn't work like that, religion does. "Science" harmed itself with some people and an ideology heavily censoring opponents, and by shutting down any debate, including scientific one.
Even lying about how science works?
During COVID, most everybody was operating from an incomplete data set. Public officials were wrong about some things. You can choose to see this as a conspiracy set up by big pharma, or you can see it as imperfect people doing what they could to mitigate a public health crisis.
And yes, critique the peer review process all you want. It's flawed in many ways. But this "it's us versus science" narrative is extremely, insidiously damaging to society at large. It only serves powerful people who benefit from whipping an audience into a frenzy to buy their shitty supplements or bumper stickers or whatever.
You're only saying that because you happen to disagree with what is being said. Full stop.
it is empirical that means that you should be able to re-produce the results of a thing or assertion by following the details in a paper.
The public might be able to do it themselves. But the point is, its not about who says what, its about can it be reproduced.
scientist "A" says that the sky is blue because of "x". devises an experiment to prove that. writes up the experiment, publishes it, asserts that the sky is blue because of x, and that the experiment proves this.
Scientist "B" says it bollocks, reproduces the experiment, but also extends the experiment to show that the data also says that the sky is green. Paper is published with data and method.
The process repeats until a consensus is reached where everyone can reproduce the data, and no one can disprove the hypothesis that the sky is blue because of x.
None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
When scientists don't follow their own method, how should the public decide on which findings to trust?
As documented in Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" there are periods where little progress is made because scientists get tunnel vision. It takes someone to come along and push things in a different direction, perhaps to the detriment of people with decades or lots of money sunk into a different orthodoxy, and navigating that turmoil can be challenging.
Who do you think decides which research gets funded, or published? If you go too far outside of what's acceptable to the establishment, your career is over. When there are billions of dollars on the line and your opposition can literally fund a dozen studies to "discredit" your take, it doesn't matter if your results can be reproduced or not. It could be many years before the truth comes out, if it ever does.
>None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
If you want to get funding for research then sometimes it is necessary to engage the public. If you hope to buck the well-monied establishment with hot takes, you might even need legal support. Besides that it's just interesting to hear what people are working on. I think people like to know what scientists think, and it gets boring to hear just a single opinion about things nonstop.
Science doesn’t “vote.”
If one has good results and data, their academic pedigree theoretically shouldn't matter when it comes to publication. But we know it doesn't work like that generally. The real world does not live up to our lofty ideals.
Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away. It fuels conspiracy theories such as about how big pharma is censoring ideas about natural (or already highly-available) treatments in order to make billions on devoloping their vaccines and using government levers to force people to buy them. (They did try to do that too, though they got lucky in that none of the "natural" treatments seemed to really work. But had they worked, their reaction would have been the same.)
It also means the discussions people see are going to happen on shows/forums/podcasts where the host doesn't push back on them and offer challenges and critical thinking. This not only sets a terrible example for people by demonstrating through social proof that one should accept these things uncritically, but it makes it appear as though the case is very strong and there isn't a good counter-argument! This double effect makes a strong impression on people in the exact opposite way that we want.
I think Joe Rogan has done more to bring sanity to these things than most people. Have you ever watched those episodes? He is very conversational but if there is ever a claim that doesn't seem supported, he will ask Jamie (his assistant or producer or whatever) look it up, and they are highly skeptical and choosy of sources.
We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work. We're no longer living in the society where the average person only gets information from TV or books available at their library or local book store. If there's a quack theory out there, it will get to people through the internet. The answer is not to shut down the internet. We need to expose these ideas and defeat them using logical and scientific refutation, and we need to encourage and teach critical thinking skills. This is a new world we are living in, and the tried and true techniques or censoring and book burning do not work anymore. Embrace it and use it.
> We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work
This argument (repeated) is a bit of a red herring. I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever. We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
> It fuels conspiracy theories
This is kind of a corollary to the above point: People are going to theorize conspiracies no matter what. There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis. These same people are the biggest liars around.
>We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
"You can have free speech as long as you only speak quietly in your own closet." The power to curate information or "amplify" it as you say is practically very hard to distinguish from censorship when you choose to show only things you agree with, or show only the worst straw men for the other side.
>There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
There are some "conspiracy theories" designed to discredit anyone who is skeptical of authority. The people who complain the most about conspiracy theories really just want people to stop thinking independently, and start accepting whatever their establishment says.
>Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
No platform owes you the right to amplify nonsense. The government can’t make you stop, but individual platforms or individuals themselves? They’re free to do whatever, just like you. Don’t like it? Start a Truth Social and go yell at your adoring fans all you want.
> Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
Governments of the world, including the US government, have repeatedly been shown to order these "private" platforms around. So this argument is cooked.
>While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
You should ask yourself why conspiracy theories make more sense to people than "the truth". Hint: It's because real conspiracies are commonfare.
>The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
Again this "not amplifying" is code for "censoring" or "burying". The truth inevitably shines through, even when it comes to this bullshit. You think the reality of censorship is a conspiracy, yet people have been censored heavily in this country for years now at the behest of the US government and some NGOs. Sometimes for strictly political reasons. You can call me a crackpot if you want but I've seen the censorship itself and the evidence of government involvement.
Who, pray tell, is qualified to judge what is worthy of "not amplifying"? That word makes me cringe every time because it was chosen to sound innocuous and appealing to young people. It is pure doublespeak.
Liberals even 10-15 years ago knew better than to argue for censorship. Now the left can't stop singing the praises of censorship, keep trying to redefine words to suit the agenda, and basically dragged the political dialogue into dangerous territory that was conclusively settled hundreds of years ago by brilliant philosophers.
While conspiracy theorists believe this to be the case, and they are people, they're a slightly-vocal minority, and thus it'd be disingenuous to represent what conspiracy theorists think as what "people" think, unless you clarify that you're using the term "people" to refer to 1+ persons, not any indicative majority.
As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
>> I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever.
> You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis.*
This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
Conspiracy theorists are everywhere. Just casually mention price fixing and you'll see endless speculation from just about everyone about how "they're out to get you". Mention politicians and lobbyists and they will readily speculate about who is on the take, based on stupid shit like physical traits of a person. These same people will then cry about a bunch of other conspiracy theories that don't jive with their preconceived notions.
>As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
This is true. Likewise, many "normies" regard the existence of nutty conspiracy theorists as evidence that any speculation about possible conspiracies is evidence of stupidity or even insanity.
>This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
First of all I didn't say that. Second of all, there is a lot wrong with trying to police speech, especially under the pretense of it being "disinformation". If you care about disinformation then you put out good information only, engage in debates, and so on. Basically stop treating your fellow citizens like children for merely disagreeing. Even if we want to suppress untrue information, it is extremely difficult to be 100% sure what is true, and the intellectual and popular discourse requires free expression of controversial ideas. If you don't want to have your worldview challenged, there are many ways to tune out the stuff you don't care for. The problem we have is that the authoritarians are threatened by the fact that someone out in the world disagrees with them. They can't handle that because their egos are too fragile. (Of course, some authoritarians do not care about the ideas at all. They just want power and the ideas are the tool they use to get it. We have this type in the West too.)
By the way, Rogan himself has a few entries on Quackwatch for promoting questionable supplements that he has a financial interest in. So he’s not, as you imply and he would love to have you believe “just asking questions”. He is actively engaged in the same bullshit his quack guests come on and peddle.
And vaccines do reduce transmission, which is all I ever heard about it. Not sure what side effects you're talking about.
Is there any research to indicate that a lack of urushiol has negative effects, similar to how we know that a lack of vitamin D has negative effects?
If not I don't really see the connection
NHS (UK) guidance:
> Government advice is that everyone should consider taking a daily vitamin D supplement during the autumn and winter.
> People at high risk of not getting enough vitamin D, all children aged 1 to 4, and all babies (unless they're having more than 500ml of infant formula a day) should take a daily supplement throughout the year.
(People at high risk = for example darker skin, or indoor jobs.)
Basically, we're spending far less time working out in the open so our body doesn't generate vitamin D on its own in sufficient quantities, and the trend towards highly processed, nutritionally inflexible diets on one side and vegetarianism/veganism on the other side leads to a whole host of malnutrition issues.
Unfortunately, the "malnutrition" levels in bloodwork are mostly calibrated on white European males... so similar to BMI [1] and a few medications and diseases [2], there is a "vitamin D paradox" in Black people who seem to not be that sensitive to lower vit-D levels than White people [3].
Human bodies and genetics are fascinating, even if you're not an expert in it.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9877251/
You're right about overdoing it. There is such a thing as vitamin D poisioning. I think it draws calcium out of your bones or something. On the other hand, not enough vitamin D is bad for your bones too.
Fortunately, there are tests for vitamin D. If you think you have a problem with it, you ought to get a test.