Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Intestinal flora are complex. Here's a story about Akkermansia muciniphila (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22458428) which appears to make it harder for people to become obese.

Here's an article from Nature that shows mice can become more easily obese if you infect them with some, er, stuff, and that this is transmissible (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05...)

So you could be giving yourself stuff that would make it easier for you to become obese, or you could be giving yourself stuff that would make it easier for you to stay not-obese.

And that's just these few bugs. There are a whole range of really quite unpleasant things you could be getting.

Regulations are important. They're not to protect well informed people from making calm rational choices, although they do have that unfortunate effect sometimes. Regulations are to prevent cynical, or stupid, people from offering dangerous untested unproven "treatments" at great cost to desperate and ill people.

It'd be great if there was a safe way to decouple these, allowing people to gamble with their own health if that's what they want to do, but protecting people from evil con-merchants.

> Regulations are to prevent cynical, or stupid, people from offering dangerous untested unproven "treatments" at great cost to desperate and ill people.

That's the rationale for the regulations, but it's not why we have them. The laws we have didn't get passed because the public demanded protection. They got passed because industry groups pushed hard for them, as a way to lock out potential competitors.

A system actually designed to prevent harm would look quite different.

Preventing the use of a good treatment (type I statistical error) is just as bad as allowing a bad treatment (type II statistical error). A balanced regulatory regime would make both kinds of errors with about equal probability. Our current system is so heavily biased toward preventing type II errors that we accept a vast number of type I errors.

Well that's simple politics. Type I errors are largely invisible, and most of the public wouldn't comprehend your argument anyway so the status quo is the only politically feasible solution.

Which is why politics is the wrong tool for trying to solve this kind of problem.

One of my favorite quotes on this subject from Kurt Harris:

>This is why I am very hesitant to offer ANY specific prescriptions for what to do about your gut biome. The advice to eat dirty vegetables or even start walking around barefoot in the dirt or drinking pond water or whatever "natural" activity you can think of is VERY DANGEROUS.

>The reason is not all parasites are "old friends", only some of the ones that are commensals that we co-evolved with. Getting toxoplasmosis from a cat, or a zoonotic helminth from dog shit or a dead raccoon or a pig tapeworm will do your immune system no favors and could even kill you.

>DO NOT PLAY AROUND WITH THIS CONCEPT UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

  | walking around barefoot in the dirt [...] is
  | VERY DANGEROUS

Really?

In many parts of the country, yes, you get worms this way.

Hookworms directly or some other worms via eggs into small cuts.

Not in the US. They're very rare in the US, and everywhere with indoor plumbing.

People who are deliberately trying to get infected as a treatment for their Crohn's or arthritis have literally resorted to travelling to the third world.

This whole concept sounds like a South Park episode waiting to happen.

You mean eating with your bum?

Curing asthma with hookworm...

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053

And hookworm is trivially treated with antibiotics.

Soil transmitted helmiths (aka worms) are a huge medical burden on the world. CDC estimates more than 1 billion people are infected.

This comment looked interesting but was a little tricky to track down, so here it is in its entirety:

http://huntgatherlove.com/node/693#comment-476489235

The rest of his comments (click his name) are all similarly interesting.

You're exactly right. I had posted a portion of the quote on twitter and literal googling with that turned up nothing. I'm guessing those comments aren't being indexed.

If you're curious, the guy used to run a blog about paleo, although as time went on he started to hate that label and the movement in general (I imagine a lot of that comment thread is hard to understand without some context into the community around that time). Anyway, he hasn't posted anything in over a year. http://www.archevore.com/

If only there were some way that people could make choices for themselves. Perhaps in the future we can invent a political system where individuals have responsibility for their own fate. Then, well-informed people would be rightly be able to do as they thought best, and everyone else would learn to only take action with proper knowledge, making everyone better-informed.

Until such a mystical system of rights can be invented, we're just going to have to keep forcing people to die and suffer from disease. Such a conundrum! It seems to be a problem that no HN threads have a solution for.

> If only there were some way that people could make choices for themselves.

People are fucking idiots and need to be protected from themselves.

Don't you see the imbalance between a person dying of cancer, who may be easily persuaded to spend all their money on junk, and a multinational multi-billion dollar industry, which has been shown to hide adverse results, to manipulate research, to sell minimally effective medication for huge amounts of money, and to bribe doctors?

Since you're an authoritarian with bad philosophy, may I declare you a "fucking idiot" and "protect" you from yourself by e.g. discarding your opinion and promoting a free society anyway? Or maybe I should force it on you? You seem to be telling me to. A (more) free society would actually be good for you, even though you don't know it.

I'm almost entirely certain DanBC was being sarcastic. Hence the second paragraph of his comment, which makes no sense whatsoever if he was telling it straight.

(https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=silver%20...)

Even with regulations, we have pharma companies behaving wantonly. Leave the markets unregulated and we will have worse behavior. Also, there is a lot of self regulation that the pharma companies are expected to do.

I find it odd, and sad that you've been "down voted", because people are pushing an ideological agenda and not reality:

http://www.badscience.net/category/big-pharma/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Pharma-companies-mislead-patient...

There are serious issues with the current models used by Corporations <> Science, and I'd expected HN to be a little more rational.

Bottom line: if $ is at stake, of course "rational actors" will fudge their lines to prevent losses. It's not rocket science.

Now - I've included a couple of decent links, to extremely well researched and honest analysis. If I get down-voted, I feel that HN has lost the spirit that drove most early coders.

A =! A is not an objectivist philosophy, it's Logic, and what code is based upon. Ideology can go take a flying leap, this is Science.

Yes, even with regulation we have some pretty appalling behaviour by pharmaceutical companies.

The benefits of regulation means that when we discover that behaviour we punish those companies, and warn other companies to stop doing it.

It is sub-optimal, but much preferable to freedom of access to any snake-oil sales-people.

> People are fucking idiots and need to be protected from themselves.

The only flaw there is the people doing the protecting tend to be ... well, you get the idea.

Yes! Good point! Regulations made by those people have unfathomable idiotic qualities. The new CARB compliant gas can design in the USA etc.

I second this strongly. It's not a statement of political beliefs, it's the observable reality.

You can see this everywhere. I know some otherwise smart people that keep falling for homeopathy, anti-vaccination or weird MLM schemes. It is partially understandable - you can't be an expert in everything, you need to rely on trust in things you don't understand well. But in general, the level of rationality in people is quite low.

Sure, freedom and all. But then let's figure out how to get rid of the parasites who abuse human stupidity. How to kill homeopathy, how to shut down "financial consulting" MLM-cults, etc. because obviously, most people can not protect themselves from them.

"People are stupid. Bureaucrats are stupid with bad incentives." -- Robin Hanson (from memory)

@EarthLaunch here's a thread with a solution.

Don't horde information, share it with everybody in the most accessible way. Let experts from all sorts validate and approve the information. Volunteers or Companies, need to be differentiated. Transparent IDs are neccessary for participants, but anonymous contributions should also be allowed.

Wikipedia is just the beginning of that idea, but it's not working until you people share your knowledge instead of keeping it locked for your own profit.

A related excellent article by Michael Pollan

"Some of My Best Friends Are Germs"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-...

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