51–60 of 147 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the urge to summarize, but maybe interested HN users can be expected to read the article before coming to the comments? This seriously degrades the quality of discussion.
There is a popular trend where people will read the comments first and depending on the discussion they move to read the article
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it’s an inspiring story for sure, and a good reminder to experts to curb their arrogance and keep an open mind. It’s also worth noting that by about midway through the process he was largely an expert in the field, and who cares if he was self taught. The professors and surgeons who listened to him obviously thought he was competent enough to listen to his ideas and act with him. The last thing the world needs, howev…
> That, after all, is how we’ve ended up with anti vaxxers, a resurgence in largely cured infectious diseases, and many other medical and social ailments of our modern age (politics anyone?) Medicine is great when it works, but sometimes it causes the diseases they supposedly treat. Psychiatry is a case study in ideological capture resulting in iatrogenic illness. My girlfriend was misdiagnosed, but since they use th…
Psychology is kind of a special case, since there's often no physical evidence of the condition. You're just going by what you see and hear from the patient. Add to that the replication crisis, which is especially bad in the field of psychology, and you'll get a lot of things you think are proven but really aren't. And of course then there's the added issue of the justice system in your case. While already being punitive in general, they also use forced therapy and institutionalization as a punitive measure rather than a protective one used only in emergencies. Other fields of medicine don't have these problems (except for the replication crisis to some extent).
> The tragedy of Psychiatry is that the physiology of the conditions are largely understood, but this understanding didn't reach the practitioners working with patients.
That's also one of the problems. Practitioners aren't required to keep up with new research (maybe in some jurisdictions they are? I'd be interested to know), so many work on obsolete knowledge. I'd assume that many very specialized doctors like brain surgeons do keep up somewhat, but GPs most likely don't. It probably depends on their workplace as well. This one is common to all fields of medicine.
> Medicine is great when it works, but sometimes it causes the diseases they supposedly treat.
I'd say that's usually not the case (i.e. vaccines won't give you the disease they should protect you from), but psychology is special once again. With psychotherapy, patients can feel pretty vulnerable, and a bad therapist can make things worse by exacerbating existing mental disorders or even inducing new ones. Psychiatry works with lots of double-edged medications. A good psychiatrist will work with their patients to find the right medication and dosage, but a bad therapist may just prescribe whatever they think is right and disregard the patients opinions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious what sort of stresses are thought to cause adrenal issues. Can they be environmental/situational vs. chronic hereditary? About 5 years ago I was fairly healthy, eating great and CrossFit 6 days a week. Then my body started to become tired all the time. I had pretty high work stress at the time along with what might be considered frequent physically stressful workouts. I suddenly found myself sleeping most…
A year ago I was doing CrossFit 6 days a week. Then I started getting more and more tired. I developed ulcerative colitis and now I alternate between insomnia and sleeping 12 hours a day. I think years of physical stress from crossfit triggered latent disease. I'm still trying to get my body working normally again. Yoga and CBD are helping.
It's interesting to see the parallels between his story and the story of others who became entrepreneurs. I see so many stories of entrepreneurs finding a problem with their life or in the world and then fixing it. This guy took it to the extreme and managed to fix a medical alignment within himself all while bedridden.
This applies to almost any health problem you might encounter in the US. It's rare to find a doctor who actually cares and even more rare to find one that will dig deep to help you.
One of the greatest lies ever told is that you can trust your doctor and that there isn't more you can do if the doctor says so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do they do yearly physicals? You must not have hmo coverage.
My HMO, Kaiser Permanente, does free or cheap annual physicals. In fact they will beg/harass you to take them. I'm assuming they have data showing 15 minutes once a year saved them big money when they can catch expensive issues early.
Edit: here’s more on the subject https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/a-checkup-for-the-checku...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My HMO, Kaiser Permanente, does free or cheap annual physicals. In fact they will beg/harass you to take them. I'm assuming they have data showing 15 minutes once a year saved them big money when they can catch expensive issues early.
Well I guess it depends on what you call an annual physical. Check vitals + simple blood test may be cost effective. Generally the evidence is against the benefits of annual physicals and any cost conscious hmo knows that. Edit: here’s more on the subject https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/a-checkup-for-the-checku...
Edit: A scan of the internet seems to show most physicals are checking vitals, blood tests, and some lifestyle questions... unless you're old or have an existing health complication in which they check more stuff.
Also I'm vegetarian so I like to check iron, creatine and B-12 levels. And I like to take the opportunity for a free STD check.
I don’t understand why it took so long for him to get this diagnosis. Elevated adrenaline levels are easily tested for in a simple catecholamine blood test. That test is among the basic panel done when one sees an endocrinologist. It may not have pinpointed his adrenal medulla as the problem, but it should have pointed them in that general direction very early on.
Because doctors in the western medicine tradition don't always accept a patient's symptoms at face value. The person in the story got referred to psychiatry because medicine didn't believe him. Similarily, many legit medical disorders are discounted as not real symptoms by western medicine until decades later, for example, lyme disease, which is caused by a real organism with a real transmission pathway (ticks), with…
It's story after story about people asking for help, doctors telling them to "Just go home and wait a while and see what happens," until the person figures out the problem themselves and struggles to find a doctor that believes them.
This is incorrect. norADRENALINE is a more specific version of ADRENALINE made in different parts of the body (and which also acts as a neurotransmitter). outside of nerves, noradrenaline acts on alpha receptors which among other things constrict blood vessels to raise blood pressure (it is used for this in critically ill patients). adrenaline acts on the same alpha receptors, but also targets beta-receptors which have the effect of speeding up and increasing the strength of contractions in the heart (also used in critically ill patients with low blood pressures and whose hearts aren't pumping enough). Epinephrine is another word for adrenaline.
> As Lindsay delved into more medical literature, he found only 32 recorded cases of bilateral adrenal medullary hyperplasia.
I don't have numbers to counter this off the top of my head, but congenital adrenal hyperplasia is a rare syndrome, but still common enough that it is taught to every medical student and tested on our boards repeatedly.
obviously, im somewhat skeptical, but i guess that plays into his hands since I'm part of the 'establishment'. Hard to know without more medical details, which are glaringly missing from any stories I can find about him...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m curious what sort of stresses are thought to cause adrenal issues. Can they be environmental/situational vs. chronic hereditary? About 5 years ago I was fairly healthy, eating great and CrossFit 6 days a week. Then my body started to become tired all the time. I had pretty high work stress at the time along with what might be considered frequent physically stressful workouts. I suddenly found myself sleeping most…
> I’m curious what sort of stresses are thought to cause adrenal issues. Can they be environmental/situational vs. chronic hereditary? “Adrenal fatigue” is an alternative medicine diagnosis. It’s a seductively simple narrative for people seeking answers to unexplained medical issues, but the theory is very much pseudoscience instead of actual science. The biggest red flag for the adrenal fatigue theory is the claim t…
I had attempted all the psychiatric treatments recommended to me. None of them ameliorated the physical symptoms.
Then I discovered what physical compounds my body was missing, and the physical symptoms AND mental symptoms resolved. So yes, the mind and body are not separate. They are constructed out of the exact same basic building blocks.