Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source • Hacker News Board

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#131

Post by diob » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

agrue wrote: post #27

Sleep apnea is strange. Good news! We have a diagnosis, sleep apnea. You're bad at sleeping now, the thing everybody has to do all night long every day since birth. The solution is to wear a modern iron lung whenever you want or need to sleep forever. Many times it's because people are overweight but you aren't. Is that really all there is for treatment? No throat exercises or therapeutic sleeping positions? No diets…

I have sleep apnea, not overweight. I wish there was more research poured into a solution that isn't pseudoscience junk or predatory.

Grateful to the inventors of the cpap though, changed my life.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#132

Post by VikingCoder » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #13

> The morale of the story, you need to sometimes tackle your own health and take matters into your own hands The frustrating thing for me is that doing so is often labeled as being anti-science, when the truth is, this guy was actually doing the science himself. It's not anti-science to take your health into your own hands. It's anti-outdated-underfunded-medical-systems.

We all need to be our own advocates, in lots of areas.

What's concerning is when people ignore the experts completely.

Steve Jobs ignoring the advice for pancreatic cancer treatment comes to mind.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#133

Post by lunderdog » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

diob wrote: post #129

lunderdog wrote: post #126

I had surgery to expand my upper jaw and palate three weeks ago, and the improved ability to breathe during the night and day is absolutley life-changing. I used to wake up multiple times a night with a pounding heart, and could never get a restful sleep. Within a few days after surgery, I could sleep through the night and my blood pressure dropped enough to start weening off my hypertension medication. If somebody i…

Wishing you the best of luck, but when I looked into this 10 or so years ago the long term success rate of surgery seemed dubious to me. I read that scar tissue ends up building up and making the problem worse than before, so it ends up being a solution that works until then. I did end up having turbinate reduction / deviated septum surgery, so at least I can use comfy nasal pillows now. The turbinate reduction defin…

Thank you, I had not heard of the issue related to scar tissue building up. I will look into that more and ask my doctor when I see them later this week. I knew going into the surgery that it was not a sure thing that it would improve my breathing. The primary reason I had it done was to correct a bad underbite and crossbite that causes me to struggle with eating.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#134

Post by version_five » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #25

hakunin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not anti-science to take your health into your own hands. It depends on how exactly it was taken into one’s hands right? Can’t really know if it’s pro-science or anti-science until you see what a person is doing. Most people do pretty irrational stuff, based on stories of a doctor in my family.

Experiments are science, and if we knew how they’d turn out beforehand they wouldn’t be experiments. Sort of definitionally you can get pretty weird or unsafe and if you’re comfortable with it not working it’s still a totally valid experiment.

No, experiments are really only science in the usual sense if you have an expectation of how they will turn out and you run the experiment to test your hypothesis. And properly constructing the hypothesis, to include past knowledge and some causal mechanism is vitally important, the causal part being often neglected even in "real" science.

There was a lot of this during Covid (which I know is a bad example because of it's political baggage, but anyway). Various "x cures / helps with covid" trends (sometimes including studies) but not really based on a anything. It's not really scientific to just imagine something could work, and then try it. Contrast it with vaccines, where, regardless of your view on the covid one, there's an actual plausible causal pathway from being exposed to it to getting immunity, so it's possible and a legit thing to do to run an experiment to see if it works.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#135

Post by dv_dt » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

kick_in_the_dor wrote: post #125

jonnycomputer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been like that in the US like forever. Once you actually have medical problems. The main difference is the whole going bankrupt thing.

I'm a US expat living in London for 1.5y. I find the opposite is true. US healthcare moves much faster and turnaround to getting a new appointment with a specialist is a fraction of the time in the UK (NHS only). My SO had a personal health issue that she attempted to get help for in the UK. She had to wait months for a GP appointment with the NHS, only to be told "let's monitor the issue" instead of actually doing a…

As far as I can follow, the NHS has been severely and intentionally undermined of resources by the ruling party. They are in the cusp of doctors going on strike.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#136

Post by version_five » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

jonhohle wrote: post #100

I’m going through this right now and it feels like everything Americans have complained about socialized healthcare is now true in the US as well: long wait times to see providers, providers that churn through patients like their doing oil changes, providers that just push you along to the next step in a playbook without considering individual needs. I’ve been dealing with fatigue for about two years and had to preem…

I don't have any experience with US healthcare, but presumably having insurance and whatever conditions they enforce is basically a form of socialized healthcare, no?

If one wanted to, couldn't they find a provider they could pay to deal with whatever issue immediately?

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#137

Post by bmarquez » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

yosito wrote: post #13

> The morale of the story, you need to sometimes tackle your own health and take matters into your own hands The frustrating thing for me is that doing so is often labeled as being anti-science, when the truth is, this guy was actually doing the science himself. It's not anti-science to take your health into your own hands. It's anti-outdated-underfunded-medical-systems.

Absolutely. I was prescribed an APAP with the default pressures set from 4-20. The doctor claimed that the "machine would do all the work" but I still had poor sleep quality. Ended up downloading Sleepyhead (the predecessor to OSCAR) and self-titrated using a band of 90% reported pressure.

My sleep improved but my doctor got mad because I wasn't listening to medical advice, but going into the APAP clinician settings and changing them myself.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#138

Post by sanman811 » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

vaylian wrote: post #60

lmohseni wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a book called Breath by James Nestor, it’s all about the benefits of nose breathing. Anecdotally this has completely fixed my sleep apnea/ snoring/ energy levels/ etc. Highly recommended!

What are the best strategies for increasing nose breathing?

I would also suggest looking into the Oxygen Advantage system. Just finished reading the Breathing Cure by Patrick McKeown, makes some interesting claims but mostly found helpful exercises to retrain nasal breathing

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#139

Post by makerdiety » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

acyou wrote: post #80

Open source is not how we got here. We now reap the benefits of centuries of well organized publicly funded research and private for profit business activities. We should not misunderstand or misconstrue history. What technology and advancement has open source really given us, that isn't just piracy when it comes right down to it? I realize I am asking a selection of would-be pirates. Genuine question. We skim the cr…

You're saying open source is nothing but piracy in the long run? Strange. But if this open source pirate subject just translates to open source technology being a parasite feeding off of organized large scale labor like that from a geopolitical country, then any open source failure would invite the possibility of open source being an optional feature of any intellectual culture. Open source is a failed experiment, perhaps? Open source being a failed experiment would definitely make sense if open source is basically the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin. On the way to its decentralizing disintegration into new derivatives.

Re: Night of the living brain fog dead or how I hacked myself better via open source

#140

Post by LoganDark » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

Mezzie wrote: post #121

LoganDark wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was never diagnosed with ADHD because medical professionals never noticed any symptoms on the outside. But inside, I was always suffering, I just didn't know what it was called. Once I learned about ADHD and that I checked every box, I started taking stimulants (even without an ADHD diagnosis) and they solved everything. I think my case was just so severe that nobody saw me struggle with it, because it was impossib…

> I think my case was just so severe that nobody saw me struggle with it. Same with me but PTSD. Like the fact that I'm remarkably functional in crisis mode doesn't mean that it's not a problem I live there all the time. A surprising amount of medicine relies on having a stable baseline against which to compare and if that's not there, the tests don't work.

> Same with me but PTSD. Like the fact that I'm remarkably functional in crisis mode doesn't mean that it's not a problem I live there all the time.

Exactly! I wanna fix something wrong with me, not something preventing me from becoming a work slave. I want to be happy with myself, not just useful to society. My own happiness should trump most metrics of functionality.