261–270 of 334 posts
Why not look at the underlying cause? I was diagnosed with sleep apnea when I was 50. An oral surgeon wanted to carve out my tonsils and uvula. I changed my diet and began exercising. Lost 50 pounds. My sleep apnea went away and I no longer even snore. The downside of getting diagnosed is my life insurance company dropped me.
That ought to be illegal. Could you get re-tested, certified healthy, and restore your insurance?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flipside, there are also a small selection of unproven treatments that work better than standard care.
If they're unproven, how do you know they work better than standard (=proven) care?
It’s expensive to go through that rigorous process, and there’s no economic incentive to go through that for something that isn’t patentable. In the case of cranberry juice, it’s not sold as medicine. In the case of alcohol, you can buy very expensive wipes that have a certification if you need it for some industrial process.
> 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 It's anti-outdated-underfunded-medical-systems.
Exactly this. I've also dealt with the whole CPAP thing, and the extent to which the whole industry is obviously infantilizing-for-profit is infuriating. Over the years, it's gotten increasingly difficult to just "buy the supplies yourself," (aka easily and/or cheaply) and the extremely condescending "reasoning" we get is "oh, it's medical equipment and therefore dangerous so we get to control it." And here , having…
Improperly designed tubes can accumulate or retain moisture, and that small fan will blow mold into your lungs overnight.
Would you trust an Alibaba CPAP sold on Amazon for $50?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flipside, there are also a small selection of unproven treatments that work better than standard care.
The standard of care doesn’t mean it’s optimal for everyone. Doctors will often explore alternative treatments when the first-line measures aren’t working optimally. It’s a mistake to ignore proven, first-line treatments and skip straight to less proven alternatives, though. Some people have built an anti-mainstream bias that puts too much emphasis on the unproven, alternative treatments while downplaying the most pr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flipside, there are also a small selection of unproven treatments that work better than standard care.
Can you share an example of an unproven treatment that works better than standard care?
Aloe vs cortisol for skin issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"so it's possible and a legit thing to do to run an experiment to see if it works. " I think it is possible and legit scientific to run experiments on allmost anything, no matter how weird. What matters is how you do the experiment and what is the result - does it work? And if it does, is it reproducible? Thats the key difference between a scientific and a esoteric experiment. But you totally can investigate whether…
I wish there was an app where I could design experiments, and people could opt-in to participating in them. I'd of course participate in other people's experiments . The app could handle the statistical reasoning. Every now and then, there would be a strong enough signal in the data to attract "real" scientists to problems that would otherwise go unexplored.
People are gonna do weird stuff anyhow, we might as well see if some good can come of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take magnesium for migraine and vertigo. Very much not a believer in supplements -- before this, I went through years of specialists prescribing various pharmaceuticals with various side effects. These days the problem is under control without any meds; I just take magnesium (specifically, a mix of l-threonate, glycinate and taurate), telling myself every day that it's probably unrelated to my feeling better. Like…
>> Very much not a believer in supplements …why? Vitamin, mineral, and nutrient deficiencies are a very well known science.
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…
There absolutely are therapeutic sleeping positions. Sleep on your side. Google it for yourself or https://www.sleepcycle.com/sleep-apnea/optimal-sleep-positio... .
1) side sleep - didn't work after a while
2) cpap with giant over-the-nose mask - I couldn't stand it and I rejected it
3) a boil-and-bite mouthguard to keep my jaw in place and not sliding back - didn't work after a while
4) same cpap as #2, but with nasal pillows - has worked since then
by the way, I had to really learn to breathe through my nose for #4. I guess I didn't always do that, especially with allergies.
losing weight, exercise - good for me, but didn't solve it