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Comment by simmerup | Hacker News Reader

People are adults and can be willing to take chances on anecdotes instead of waiting 30 years for science to maybe fund some studies that end up just as murky

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My friend had a kid with a bad eczema. She tried everything. Desperate, she took her to one of these charlatans. He asked the girl to stand on a copper plate. After a few days the eczema disappeared. Now my friend totally believes in all this stuff.

The risk to reward ratio there is off the charts though.

I mean, if I didn’t have anything else I was trying that could plausibly explain it, that’d be really hard to resist accepting as the cause. Totally understand it.

It’s hard to internalize we see permanent and seemingly arbitrary changes from things like hormone levels. The last teen pimple for example isn’t noticeable in the moment as the last teen pimple because you don’t know the future etc etc.

We still don't understand the placebo effect. But definitely better to accept it's a thing and move on than believe grifters actually know what they're talking about.

The placebo effect is unlikely to be important here.

Hormonal changes mean people have permanent differences in their skin at specific points in time. Eczema is known to respond more cyclically with menstrual cycles, which is a lot easier to correlate.

"Biome recolonized by the bacteria of hundreds of other people who also put their dirty feet on the plate"

It's a wonderful theory, but alas. Copper is aggressively antimicrobial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...

Antimicrobial isn’t the same thing as sterile. You can culture bacteria after swabbing a copper plate people are touching.

I have small amounts of eczema on unfortunate spots. It comes and goes usually based on stress and inflammation. Been dealing with it for decades. It stinks.

I’m half tempted to buy myself a copper plate to stand on.

Think of it as an investment. Copper is getting more valuable every day.

It's probably the stopping of other treatments that fixed it. I had bad eczema and psoriasis. It stopped (after weeks) after I stopped treating it with random creams and taking cool showers. I later found out that the culprit was lidocaine.

Also copper is biocidal, so maybe there's something there.

Sure, I don't disagree with that. Although, in addition to labelling something as an anecdote, it's also useful to flag the confounding factors.

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