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Educate Your Immune System

nytimes.com

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Re: Educate Your Immune System

#31

Post by ellyagg »

Lxr wrote: post #26
kome wrote: post #2

Nice little article! And it confirms my anecdotal evidence, so it feels good. ;) I had a wild childhood: it happened to me to eat hamster food from his cage, eating dirt, eating sand, raw tomatoes directly from the plant, drinking waters from random streams; drinking raw milk without boiling it few minutes after milking it by hand, eating raw eggs, and when I wasn't in school, like during the summer, I had one shower…

I promise there are plenty of patients with autoimmune disease who had childhoods just like yours. I don’t want to sound hostile but “I am not sick, because I do/did X” is a) not scientifically useful and b) somewhat insulting to patients who suffer from chronic illness. The truth is everyone has risk factors for most diseases and there is still an incredibly large probabilistic element involved - some people are jus…

> not scientifically useful

This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#32

Post by makmanalp »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #25
kome wrote: post #2

Nice little article! And it confirms my anecdotal evidence, so it feels good. ;) I had a wild childhood: it happened to me to eat hamster food from his cage, eating dirt, eating sand, raw tomatoes directly from the plant, drinking waters from random streams; drinking raw milk without boiling it few minutes after milking it by hand, eating raw eggs, and when I wasn't in school, like during the summer, I had one shower…

Doesn't always work though. I grew up in the countryside and similar to you I ate dirt, wild fruit (best ever was a egg plum tree we found, though the natural laxative effect was unwelcome), drank from streams etc etc. Unfortunately, I developed an allergy to dogs, despite living with one for nearly 10 years! I left for literally 3 months and upon my return I was allergic. Also I still get colds and illnesses like mo…

I'm trying to find the source, but I remember reading something about allergies appearing in people later in life, and overexposure in that case was also a factor, IIRC

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#33

Post by Dr_tldr »

ellyagg wrote: post #31
Lxr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise there are plenty of patients with autoimmune disease who had childhoods just like yours. I don’t want to sound hostile but “I am not sick, because I do/did X” is a) not scientifically useful and b) somewhat insulting to patients who suffer from chronic illness. The truth is everyone has risk factors for most diseases and there is still an incredibly large probabilistic element involved - some people are jus…

> not scientifically useful This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).

But beyond being a humblebrag, it's also bordering on a just-world view of the universe that's basically superstition.

Without reference to a larger dataset, the inference "I"m never sick because I played in the woods and ate weird stuff. If you get sick a lot, it's partially your fault because you didn't do that." could easily be replaced with "I'm never sick because I prayed to the right god every day. If you get sick a lot..."

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#34

Post by LionessLover »

o_____________o wrote: post #24
LionessLover wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I not say that face to face? Do you think any negative reply to anyone is bad? What horrible rose-colored world do you live in? How about you adjust your sensitivity setting? It's on an unhelpfully low level that prevents normal function and utilization of normal communication. I also find it how remarkably consistent my experience is that people who complain about "tone" never, ever have anything to say ab…

You could have communicated the same idea without petty, hostile sarcasm.

Sarcasm is a valuable tool in the human communication arsenal. If you want to do without it, be my guest, but don't try to dictate your subjective preferences to others who have what I would claim is a more mature and more healthy attitude towards the beauty and variety in human language.

And the "petty" is all in your head. There are too many people who blame others for what's in their own head.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#36

Post by Dr_tldr »

gumby wrote: post #11
kyriakos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time.

> Lets not also forget how allergies are more common in the developed world and particularly in children living in the cities who don't generally get a lot of outside play time. The evidence for this is not clear. Actual research is needed, and such research is complex, expensive, and unfortunately potentially political. This article describes a very nice A/B experiment for this one autoimmune condition but makes no…

> But outside these few cases we don't know. One factor is reporting. Do poor kids in India suffer fewer allergies or are they simply dwarfed by the other problems -- or just not reported?

This is a great point that gets overlooked: lack of data is often taken as non-existence, even implicitly. When the average life expectancy is under 50 and there's fewer than one doctor for every 10,000 people, sneezing and occasional sinus pain doesn't even warrant a mention.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#37

Post by kome »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #33
ellyagg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not scientifically useful This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).

But beyond being a humblebrag, it's also bordering on a just-world view of the universe that's basically superstition. Without reference to a larger dataset, the inference "I"m never sick because I played in the woods and ate weird stuff. If you get sick a lot, it's partially your fault because you didn't do that." could easily be replaced with "I'm never sick because I prayed to the right god every day. If you get s…

> it's partially your fault because you didn't do that

I never implied that. If something, I said that too much pressure by society is making parents work harder, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#39

Post by wonkaWonka »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #33
ellyagg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not scientifically useful This isn't a peer reviewed journal, we're just a community chatting about stuff, so that's not really a germane standard. Anecdotes are a perfectly reasonable input into our personal Bayesian inference filters, since no one has all the answers yet (not even close).

But beyond being a humblebrag, it's also bordering on a just-world view of the universe that's basically superstition. Without reference to a larger dataset, the inference "I"m never sick because I played in the woods and ate weird stuff. If you get sick a lot, it's partially your fault because you didn't do that." could easily be replaced with "I'm never sick because I prayed to the right god every day. If you get s…

Claims of humblebraggadocio is the HN counterpart to calling out an "edgelord" elsewhere.

As a word, humblebrag is irritating to see in use, even if you are not its target.

Re: Educate Your Immune System

#40

Post by o_____________o »

LionessLover wrote: post #34
o_____________o wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have communicated the same idea without petty, hostile sarcasm.

Sarcasm is a valuable tool in the human communication arsenal. If you want to do without it, be my guest, but don't try to dictate your subjective preferences to others who have what I would claim is a more mature and more healthy attitude towards the beauty and variety in human language. And the "petty" is all in your head . There are too many people who blame others for what's in their own head.

Sarcasm can be very valuable. It can also be used to contemptuously insult someone when a simple rebuttal would suffice.

The latter is an immature, weak intellectual position (see Appeal to Ridicule and Question Begging Epithet) that says nothing more than "you are so wrong as to look asinine".

This only fosters more emotional, insult-riddled dialogue, which is why the user above quoted HN guidelines, which you are now impotently raging against. This is a pretty civil place, we like to keep it that way.

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