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Comment by cuasijoe | Hacker News Reader

Start eating pineapple, you will be surprised of the effect on the floaters.

There's something to be said about HN, the supposed rationality and intelligence of the forum, and the massive blind spot posters have about anything medical or otherwise biological.

There is no scientific consensus on it!

Although I doubt there's any harm in eating more fruit.

There is some actual science here, just the studies aren't great. I have floaters and stumbled on research out of Taiwan related to this. Mostly out of Tiawan. There is some possible confirmation from Italy, but the study was a cocktail treatment, so you can't isolate the bromelain effects.

What I haven't seen is any properly controlled study proving it false. Just a cluster of researchers in Tiawan with flawed study construction.

Partner may be happy with pineapple :) But I wouldn't expect much more.

One can always get the surgery, where they vacuum them out..doesn't seem worth the risk to me, even if they annoy me.

I talked to my ophthalmologist about this (he was not only good, he was a professor at a teaching hospital)

He said, there may be some doctors who purport to do this kind of thing. The way he was saying it though was maybe you could floater removal, and a butt lift at the same time from a sketchy doctor.

I believe there’s a laser surgery to break up the big ones that’s would have far less adverse side effects (though, I suppose maybe the chance of something even worse).

I'm bothered constantly by the way statements are shared without any back up. Cite a source at least.

There's a typical problem with many sorts of simple treatments. Even though they're simple, organizing 'proper' medical studies on their effect is quite expensive. It's not the drugs that are expensive in medical trials, but the organization, staffing, recruitment, monitoring, and so on. Who's going to pay?

With patentable drugs this isn't a problem, because big pharma stands to make billions if they discover a patentable treatment, but something like pineapples can't be patented or profited off of. For another example, in most of Asia you will see ginger recommended medicinally/prophylactically just about everywhere. I always assumed it was kind of hokey, but when you look at what studies have been done (e.g. as a treatment or prophylactic for colds), not only does it have an effect, but a rather large one.

Indeed. As I see it, it boils down again and again to this: Is someone reading the primary molecular-biology literature? Anyone?

(Law of headlines: No.)

For instance, Ginger and its pungent constituents non-competitively inhibit activation of human recombinant and native 5-HT3 receptors of enteric neurons, as they say. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nmo.12107

Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.

And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"

and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha

It's always the problem of not knowing what you don't know. And as one grows older you tend to learn that you know less and less than you once thought, at least if you continue to seek out knowledge. Which makes it a bit paradoxical. The more you know, the more you know how little you know.

How can we possibly talk about something without a scientific concensus.

Interesting. This is from personal experience? Has anyone else eaten pineapple and had a similar experience?

Apparently the subject of some small studies, could do with some replication

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition/pinea...

Interesting. Summarizing: pineapples contain a compound which breaks up collagen. No proof it does that to the human body, or floaters specifically.

But if it did, I’ve got terrible collagen and so I won’t be eating pineapple everyday, regardless of what the Taiwanese pineapple council would like me to do.

Pineapple contains enzymes that digest flesh. I don't know if that's relevant here, but it seemed worth mentioning.

Even so, how would a meaningful amount of it be delivered to the eye from oral ingestion without damaging anything in between?

I am taking some bromelain and papain capsules which according to some (small) studies should help. In my experience, the floaters became more transparent, but don't disappear. This is still useful i guess.

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