Holy Dunning–Kruger effect...
As a software developer, I am a much better doctor than actual trained doctors, and am definitely immune to any placebo effects.
As a software developer, I am a much better doctor than actual trained doctors, and am definitely immune to any placebo effects.
I don’t know what people think you learn in medical school that makes you an infallible source of health knowledge.
The problem is not with evidence-based medicine itself, but with how the evidence is generated. The gold standard of medical evidence--a large, randomized, double-blind clinical trial--is extraordinarily expensive. In practice, much of this research is funded by private industry, which must have a reasonable expectation of earning a return on its investment. That naturally directs research toward treatments that can be patented, commercialized, and sold at a profit.
This creates a structural blind spot. Many naturally occurring compounds cannot be patented in their natural form, making it difficult to justify the enormous cost of conducting the kind of trials that modern medicine demands. As a result, potentially useful natural therapies often remain under-studied, not because they have been proven ineffective, but because the economic incentives to investigate them are weak.
This is the reason your doctor is much more likely prescribe Ambien CR than to suggest trying magnesium supplements.
Do you know they’re wrong? Please don’t invoke Dunning Kruger like this, it’s cliché and also wrong to do. There’s no indicator for whatever it is Dunning & Kruger showed, you cannot know if it applies to a single person. Their main plot showed a positive correlation between confidence and competence. Their paper has problems, their methodology has been rightly questioned, and some attempts to reproduce have failed. Plus keep in mind that, ironically, for people who are intimately familiar with the debate over DK, using it to essentially name-call someone backfires and has the opposite of the intended effect, it makes the name caller look confidently ignorant.
Placebo Effect is not Dunning Kruger. Making incorrect assumptions or having incorrect beliefs is not Dunning Kruger either.
Possible is not certain. So if it’s not a placebo effect? If the author found a solution that is in fact a better root cause fix for themselves than sleeping pills? What does that make their comment? What does it make yours?
> This is so typical of the software dev community.
IMO this is a worse assumption with less evidence than the one you’re complaining about, and it’s pure unsupported assumption and far more likely to be wrong. Distrust of doctors and “western medicine” is common enough to hear it all the time, I know more non-devs than devs who carry such beliefs. Unless you have statistics on devs compared to the general population, your personal sampling is entirely anecdotal, and biased.
Sleep is sadly in the same category. If you don’t have sleep apnea, and you want to get treated for sleep, you will be offered any number of pharmaceuticals, all of which are terrible. Better advice comes from other people dealing with sleep issues in this case.
This is probably the only reason why "naturopaths" and other "holistic" doctors are still in business, because they'll actually bother to consider a broader picture of a symptom as hinting at some structural imbalance rather than solely treating the symptom as a localized issue to resolve.