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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what elegant hypocrisy.

I want to change healthcare. I have spent twelve years getting myself well when the entire world says it cannot be done. I have a website. I have a mental model for how to proceed forward. I don't have the programming skills I need. I am deeply in debt from the process of accomplishing "the impossible". The specifics of my personal situation are unconducive to applying to Y-Combinator. I have a really huge credibility problem.

I am generally equally dismissed, though my intent to do something potentially world changing is sincere and backed up by more than a decade of work. But, hey, feel free to join the legion of people who have already dismissed me for not currently having some successful business model in place while claiming you would like to see people like me get more support.

Oy.

Tldr: People seek feedback at different stages. Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness.

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"Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness."

Yes it is. Ten years ago it might not have been, but these days, when vast troves of information are at virtually everyone's fingertips, there is no excuse for not having done some basic research before asking such huge questions and expecting other people to do all the work for you.

Aren't you homeless? Your first priority should be a getting a job so you can get out of debt and put a roof over your head. Then worry about big ideas like changing healthcare.

To be perfectly candid, the reason people dismiss you is that someone who seems incapable of providing for themselves to take care of their basic needs is certainly incapable of starting a hugely disruptive business.

Sorry if this is harsh. Just trying to help.

I left my job in order to finish getting well. I was working at a desk job but the building was in an industrial park, surrounded by factories. Given how expensive and debilitating my condition is via conventional treatments, it makes no sense, financial or otherwise, to pursue an income source which keeps me ill.

My first priority should be, and is, my health.

Isn't being homeless generally accepted as being more detrimental to health than pretty much any office job?

My only point is that you should start at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and take care of the basics for yourself before trying to change the world. Seriously. Get off the internet, get off HN, and figure out some way to have a stable income(or apply for disability and welfare), get health insurance, etc. After you've done that you can transform healthcare. Not before. Ranting online isn't going to change anything for you. Get out there and fix the basics.

I am fixing the basics. I know you mean well, but you do not know what you are talking about when it comes to my situation.

Also, I did not post in this thread to ask for support, but to make a point, and not about me per se. I am sorry you are so distracted by the particulars of my situation, which are really rather incidental to this discussion, which is about HN culture.

Anyway, I have things to do. Logging out now.

Later.

> I am sorry you are so distracted by the particulars of my situation, which are really rather incidental to this discussion

Well, you did talk a lot about your personal situation in your original comment, so you shouldn't act surprised that the discussion took that turn

Can you link to your website?

Sure thing.

Here is the original site:

http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml

Here is the site I am trying to migrate everything to and trying to figure out how to better present what I know:

http://www.healthgazelle.com/

Because most people do not believe me, I am up against a brick wall. I cannot get people to talk to me and it is making forward progress very challenging, to put it mildly.

What is the actual goal of the site/proposed business?

A one sentence pitch would be great as it isn't clear to me from either version of your website.

"Additionally, I make use of bits and pieces of info and advice I hear from people whom I consider "in the know" -- mostly moms who have found what works for a difficult kid that the medical community has written off."

Sounds like a sincere version of the "one quick tip that moms found to..." ads.

One mom was a former RN who formally studied a number of alternative medicine disciplines to keep her sons alive who were anaphylactic to antibiotics. Another is a lawyer who runs a website for alternative treatment info. These are educated, knowledgeable people who figured out what worked to help their children after experts had written them off. The fact that they are mothers meant they got to observe the person they were helping up close, over a long period of time. They became more familiar with the problem space than most doctors, who typically spend about 15 minutes with a patient before writing a prescription for a drug. Medicine was not always like that, but it often is so today.

"These are educated, knowledgeable people"

Who are speaking way above their level of understanding. This is not unique to untrained professionals, either. In academia plenty of tenured professors use their position to spread pseudoscience. Just because they associate their care with their childrens' improvements, does not mean that their care and specific choices for self-treatment were the cause of their childrens' improvements.

They are people who gave me useful information at a time when doctors were saying nothing could be done. Their credentials may not be anything you respect, but they knew what they were talking about.

I will work on that. I don't currently have a one sentence pitch. (My background is not in business. I have a lot of room to grow in that regard.)

The goal is to share the mental model that helped me get well when I was sentenced to death. It does not neatly fit with current mental models. Conventional medicine uses a disease model. This is a wellness model. I struggle to communicate it. People think something is deadly, thus we must nuke the body with something equally deadly. They miss that the body is the battlefield and they are turning it into a wasteland which cannot defend itself. Your body can produce its own army. You need to supply it the means to do so. Then support its effort to defend itself.

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