There's something to be said about HN, the supposed rationality and intelligence of the forum, and the massive blind spot posters have about anything medical or otherwise biological.
There is no scientific consensus on it!
Although I doubt there's any harm in eating more fruit.
There is some actual science here, just the studies aren't great. I have floaters and stumbled on research out of Taiwan related to this. Mostly out of Tiawan. There is some possible confirmation from Italy, but the study was a cocktail treatment, so you can't isolate the bromelain effects.
What I haven't seen is any properly controlled study proving it false. Just a cluster of researchers in Tiawan with flawed study construction.
I talked to my ophthalmologist about this (he was not only good, he was a professor at a teaching hospital)
He said, there may be some doctors who purport to do this kind of thing. The way he was saying it though was maybe you could floater removal, and a butt lift at the same time from a sketchy doctor.
I believe there’s a laser surgery to break up the big ones that’s would have far less adverse side effects (though, I suppose maybe the chance of something even worse).
There's a typical problem with many sorts of simple treatments. Even though they're simple, organizing 'proper' medical studies on their effect is quite expensive. It's not the drugs that are expensive in medical trials, but the organization, staffing, recruitment, monitoring, and so on. Who's going to pay?
With patentable drugs this isn't a problem, because big pharma stands to make billions if they discover a patentable treatment, but something like pineapples can't be patented or profited off of. For another example, in most of Asia you will see ginger recommended medicinally/prophylactically just about everywhere. I always assumed it was kind of hokey, but when you look at what studies have been done (e.g. as a treatment or prophylactic for colds), not only does it have an effect, but a rather large one.
Ginger is a nausea receptor blocker. For one. It just… is. And it has to be a ton of other things too.
And it's very challenging to find the right words for this. This whole thing about propagation of information. "Hey did you know that humans don't read? They can but they don't, because if this or that was worth reading, someone would have told them!"
and yeah, almost no matter what I write on this subject I always sense a pungent bitterness in the words haha
It's always the problem of not knowing what you don't know. And as one grows older you tend to learn that you know less and less than you once thought, at least if you continue to seek out knowledge. Which makes it a bit paradoxical. The more you know, the more you know how little you know.
Interesting. Summarizing: pineapples contain a compound which breaks up collagen. No proof it does that to the human body, or floaters specifically.
But if it did, I’ve got terrible collagen and so I won’t be eating pineapple everyday, regardless of what the Taiwanese pineapple council would like me to do.
I am taking some bromelain and papain capsules which according to some (small) studies should help. In my experience, the floaters became more transparent, but don't disappear. This is still useful i guess.
