Personally I don't trust big pharma or the natural or alternative medicine people who want to sell me things.
Pharma has shown itself untrustworthy too many times, and in general I don't trust big institutions with financial entanglements to have my best interest at heart.
I do have personal experience with some plant medicines being extremely effective at certain things. While most of the time it's hard to prove, some are so obvious that it makes me open to the possibility that the less obvious ones also may be helping. I use plant medicines all the time because they are free or cheap and relatively harmless like real food, in fact they often are food.
That said if I get in a car accident I will go to the hospital. It's not all or nothing.
Yeah.. there should be a prompt that gauges how savvy the user is, and if the user doesn't understand the implications of this, the default should be low precision location data with a random offset per item + random offset per user.
It has options to hide or obscure the location, which I use whenever I'm anywhere near my house, but it should be a little better about prompting users to use that.
Strava (a running tracking app) provides two helpful controls you can set as your default:
1. “Hide the start and end points of activities that start at SPECIFIC addresses.”
2. “Hide start and end no matter where they happen.”
Then it can be useful to add your home/work/routine locations.
If iNaturalist doesn’t have a setting like that, it’s a nice approach — especially if it’s included as part of initial onboarding flow — so it helps people without needing to remember to make visibility choices each time.
This represents 0.6% of meta's 2025 profits, or 0.2% of revenue. Though presumably it was based on harms from previous years, I haven't read the lawsuit.
To be clear I'd be very much in favor of scientific studies and their data having to be publicly available.
But on any controversial area, which is most of the areas anyone cares about, there will be 2+ sides of the issue and any vetting body will be compromised to some degree for one of those sides.
That's the rub, isn't it... who watches the watchmen? In times past, journalism at least had the veil of impartiality, but modern journalism is far more of an editorial activist activity than simply answering the 6 W's of a given story.
I'm not sure it was ever actually much better... and it may just be my pessimistic Gen X nature. But I've personally seen too many misrepresentations about too many studies where the body and available data in fact don't match the headlines or the numbers themselves are deceptive in a way that is much less significant than represented.
200% the risk of X... when in sample A of 10000, 1 had X, and in sample b of the same size, 2 had X... while it's a real relative stat, the absolute values are all but meaningless in context.
Yellow journalism existed generations before you and I. The institution was always sullied by the worst and has always contained some of the most dogged pestering fact finders.
It’s not even clear that journalists of the 1960s-1980s were as impartial or brutally honest as we remember. That is most likely a halo effect from having a few highly trusted very visible personalities (eg. Walter Cronkite), but even they were slow to realize (by a decade) how much of a morass the Vietnam War was.
It was always about independence, not impartiality. Instead of having a big boss on the top issuing correct opinions, reputable news outlets gave their reporters a lot of freedom in their work. Each reporter had their own biases, and the variation within each outlet was usually greater than the variation between outlets.
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
I would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.
Are people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc).
There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-)
Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).
There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
Uhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
But the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
I agree it's probably healthier to eat wild meat or homegrown meat grown on healthy pasture than it is to eat feedlot meat grown on whatever they feed them there. There are lots of differences between them.
Not particularly because it has more fat though. While it's true that wild deer for example especially in warmer climates can have very little fat, there are plenty of animals that were traditionally eaten all over the world that have much higher proportions of fat. Fish, geese and ducks and many kinds of birds, whales and seals and lots of aquatic mammals, bears, etc.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of industrial beef at all I'm just trying to say that natural animal fat isn't necessarily unhealthy. (I really want to know actually if it is, because I do eat a lot of it, and have for much of my life. As far as I can tell I'm very healthy but I'm always open to learning. I have not yet found any compelling evidence for natural animal fat being bad.)
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
Different kinds of fruits from around the world may well have more in common with each other than categorically new synthetic compounds which are found in processed food.
Pretty much all people ate real foods - plants, animals, and fungus, and ferments of these, all over the world. There are categorical chemical differences between this stuff and much modern food.
> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
It doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.)
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
FWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea.
Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.
the issue with wild meat is going to be all parasites in the animal, at least according to friends who hunt (and when they managed to get something, which doesn't seem to be a given).
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.
I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
You could kill a stray! Or is it better to have someone else handle that "natural" part, or would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
Since when have vegans used dog meat in a xenophobic way? The entire point of the dog meat comparison is to highlight that meat consumption is cultural and that other cultures eat animals we consider to not be food even though they are an animal that has equivalent intelligence to animals we do eat.
Dogs are the perfect example, not because of xenophobia, but because they are such a plain example of hypocrisy that can be refuted on every point.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way, presenting it as an absurd choice that is meant to demonstrate the supposed depravity of meat eaters, even though it's wholly a cultural preference. Enough of this Motte and Bailey crap.
Of course xenophobia is nothing new to most internet veganists, their whole thing is being intolerant to the culture of billions of people around the world, so a little additional intolerance to a few Asian countries (and a few Swiss people) probably seems like no biggie.
That's patently absurd. For almost every vegan, Veganism is predicated on the belief that all animal lives should be treated equally, that there is no difference between livestock and pets except cultural!
Saying that dog meat is an example of "depravity of meat eaters" makes no sense because the "depravity of meat eaters" is demonstrable... with any meat? That's the entire point of veganism! If a vegan believes that meat eaters are depraved, they believe they are depraved whether they eat cats, dogs, cows or pigs.
You may find some xenophobic people who are vegans but what you're much more likely to find is meat eaters who think that eating dog meat in Wuhan is depraved while eating pigs in New York is totally acceptable. Who do you think is signing the "end dog meat" petitions? Western meat eaters!
I have personally never met a vegan in person or online who thought that dog meat was more depraved than pig meat. The go to argument that vegans make is that pigs and dogs are of equivalent intelligence, that you could raise a pig as you raise a dog and have the same bond. Framing the dog meat argument as xenophobic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and requires either a wilful ignorance or... I don't know. I cannot even understand how you contorted yourself into believing this.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way
You apparently have never heard or seen the fairly widespread 'the only difference is your perception' line of vegan merchandise which uses dog meat it in the opposite way: it calls out the hypocrisy of all meat-but-not-dog people. Not of a select group of people eating dog meat.
This seems off to me... Curious why you are so avidly against veganism? Most of them are not doing any harm to others, would you be against a charity that aimed to reduce harm to children?
> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
No, if anything plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet.
Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.
Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.
Just going to address a few points here in case people believe this!
> plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet
The idea that herbivores have a "less diverse" diet is rubbish. Lots of herbivores (like elephants or deer) eat hundreds of different plant species.
> "ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful"
This is also rubbish. Horses, Rhinos, Elephants, and Rabbits are all highly successful non-ruminants.
Oh and the reason horses can die from too much is because they have a one-way digestive valve, so if they eat something toxic/gas-producing, they can suffer from colic, which can be fatal. Saying they only lived "a year or two" is pure speculation btw and they aren't "fragile" because of evolution, they are "fragile" because humans have bred them for extreme speed and aesthetics, at the cost of general health etc.
I don't know where you get your information from, but it all seems very biased or hyperbolic to fit a certain viewpoint.
Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
Hardly anyone is eating raw flesh of the animal they just hunted down, so no, there's not going to be many studies to find, because approximately no one has been eating non-processed food for the past several thousands of years. Not even the "health conscious" folks so deathly afraid of the sin of "processing"; they just don't realize that washing and cutting and boiling are sins too.
The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else, which made me wonder whether you felt that the person you were replying to did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words.
Being something written for another context with no words added by you to explain how it fits into the current context puts more work on the reader, which implies that the reader needs to put in work to continue to hold up their end of the conversation (whereas you don't need to put in much work or at least don't need to indicate to us that you are putting in work) which in turn tends to put you in the position of a teacher assigning us something to read as homework.
Its being longer than the average HN comment tend to carry the same implication.
Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.
I concede that it is impossible for me to tell whether you actually felt any contempt while writing your 2 comments, but many readers react negatively to even weak signs that contempt might be present.
More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.
As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.
(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)
Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because:
1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks.
2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine.
3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.
I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.
Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.
Your claims about vaccine trials are not true. I’m not an expert and don’t have time to go and find citations to argue each of your points one by one, but I’ve read enough studies to know that vaccine trials aren’t nearly as sloppy / poorly designed as you believe.
For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).
So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.
I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.
But that’s “natural.” This is the underlying idea, that nature absent human influence is inherently more pure and good.
I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.
Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.
Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.
That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.
It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.
With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.
I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.
There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.
If the doses of cannabis required to cure alzheimers would be high enough doses to destroy the rest of one's brain, it makes this finding not very useful, similar to the idea of curing alzheimers by destroying one's brain/
But the studies are pervasive. For example, the (flawed) study that found that one cup of wine with each meal was healthier that no alcohol at all is still quoted today, and still "reproduced" in other studies that make the same claim but adding a clause of "given that you also [do good amount of exercise|eat very healthy|are in perfect health already]". Or the flawed studies that Soffriti and Belpoggi pushed (some of them didn't even pass peer review, but reached the public anyway) about artificial sweeteners and other things being carcinogenic: they basically feed mices with whatever they feel until they die, they look the corpses and if there is a tumor, eureka: what they put in the diet is the cause. Nobody took the studies seriously, except the public that now have a "scientific paper" that says Coca-cola causes breast cancer.
In this case some public reads "smoking a joint daily equals invulnerable to Alzheimer, science says so".
Yup. There's definitely a pattern and it seems like an obvious consequence of the structure of incentives.
If you make a product you can make a study that shows it has some kind of benefit in some specific way, even if it probably causes more harm in other ways that are less obvious, and then you can sell it. Media will spread around your study especially if it shows something that will be a bit click-baity, and any study or discussion of the possible downsides will get far less attention.
This is also why basically every edible plant has some article saying it's a "super food" etc etc.
Synthetic cannaboids were also studied as a possible analgesic and at the doses required it caused brain damage. Which is honestly disappointing because a general purpose pain killer that isn't opioid based would be a miracle.
although the study is often labelled irreplicable, i do still believe in rat park. opiates are not evil in and of themselves; rather, society forms a structure around which the use of opiates easily becomes more alluring than contributing to said society. consequently, those in chronic pain are often forced to suffer needlessly by being deprived of relief, so that societal productivity is maximized. the real miracle would be a fixed system, not the novel non-opiate painkiller suzetrigine. but apparently that is the next best thing.
Opiates form a quick and nasty addiction. People in constant pain (as in, 24/7 or even most of the day, every day) need to take ever increasing doses to get the same level of pain relief. You would be surprised how many folks are like that, and not only 70+ years old. It takes few weeks to form a lifelong addiction that can never be fully shed and will form a permanent crack or weakness in one's personality.
What all that, how can you defend opiates? Opinion of society is irrelevant here, they are absolute scourge if used enough, and nobody is immune.
treatment guidelines don't even stress the effect of opiates that is activation of corresponding receptors in the gut, causing water to be leached and chronic excruiciating constipation to result. if only people were told that drinking coconut water solves this problem without relying on pharmaceutical means. this is one example of opiates being demonized due to incorrect application.
i do argue that in the correct harness, opiates could be distributed to minimize unnecessary suffering at least somewhat - not 24/7, because literally any drug will result in tolerance (and debilitating physical side effects, something opiates lack) at that point. our current system is unsatisfactory - people are not taught how to take drugs correctly, and people exist in a system that naturally causes dopamine seeking reward systems to malfunction. while some are born psychologically weak, inherently leading to addiction susceptibility, society is expressly designed to produce such weakness in order to maintain the status quo. of course such an environment is not positively conducive to the dopamine flooding effects of opiates. i dont blame opiates for the system in which they exist.
regarding personality cracks, i still refer to rat park for the most part, saving brain resets such as ibogaine for extreme cases - our addiction inducing society (as a whole, not merely the opinions wherein) does not imply impossibility of rewiring addictions. regardless, some people think cracks are beautiful (ref. kintsugi).
do you argue that everyone should be instead placed on nsaids that destroy the stomach and liver, killing them earlier and objectively adding pain prior? is the current trajectory (that is, entirely depriving the suffering of effective relief, regardless as to their age bracket) for the best?
Yeah, people complain about opiates but even beta-blockers or antihypertensive agents have rebound symptoms if you stop taking them. People really just love to see others suffer instead of allowing them to use opiates.
NSAIDs are known to kill your stomach, your kidney, your liver, and your heart, whereas opiates do not. And they are ineffective for a lot of people's chronic pain, on top of that.
it's truly a shame that wilful ignorance is societally acceptable. psychopathy is a scale we all fit on; everyone modulates their empathy to varying degrees, otherwise we'd be bonobos. the downtrodden of society deservedly get that moniker - for being walked over. im happy on your behalf that you are conscious enough to know how to treat yourself correctly, and it truly is a shame that others in your position aren't taught how to do so. i do see why people are in favor of this callousness - either they have no clue what its like to hurt, or they are in fight or flight mode as a trauma response. neither of those factors change their callousness though. there definitely are a few sociopaths out there ... for the most part they would probably prefer to sell more drugs not less.
in a few years when non opiates (ones labelled as equivalent to opiates in terms of analgesia) are cheap, opiates will go the way of benzos - only prescribed by old doctors who learned under different guidelines. then chronic pain sufferers will get no pleasure at all, merely blunting. and everyone will be okay with it, the same way they are okay with schizophrenics being blunted by antipsychotics.
I was thinking the same thing. There is no way people who have chronic pain are saying these things. And if you think about it, it is sickening that people who are fine and do not have chronic pain are the ones dismissing a painkiller, or are trying to dictate someone else's life because they heard opiates are bad (opioid crisis, war on drugs).
And yeah, everyone will be okay with it. Sometimes I really wish people were in my shoes... We need more people experiencing it, otherwise we really are f....d (because they lack empathy, it seems). Good comparison to schizophrenia, by the way.
people are lulled into believing that percieving an experience is equivalent to having experienced it themselves. western civilization has neutered the populace, but that doesnt change who the populace is, even if they deny it to themselves. c.f. vicarious by tool.
ive come to the point where straight up forcing people into church to be told they are selfish 1x a week is probably the best solution. if a secular version could exist id be all ears, frankly i dont care if god is real or not, people dont follow the commandments and society would be better off if everyone did.
i made a reddit account under this handle a little while back, although it was immediately banned. so i couldnt respond, but i could recieve your email address there and reach out myself.
I have been taking high-doses of opiates for years without any issues... without the need to increase doses. Without constipation-related issues. At times I go through voluntary withdrawal, however, but that is it. Am I ought to choose pain because opiates were made to seem like the devil?
i didnt really want to add anecdotal evidence to argue against the idea that nobody is immune ... but now that n=2 ... id like to also bring up the notion that schizophrenia is considered relatively benign (if not venerated) in some cultures, and the hallucinations experienced in those cultures are themselves benign ... whereas places like north america demonize schizophrenia, resulting in affected individuals being placed on chemical straitjackets, increasing their suffering purely due to societal influence ...
Surely there many substances that some people cannot do without. Treat opiates as just another one of those. They are cheap to manufacture. Addicts can hold down a job, pay taxes etc just like the rest of us. So why not?
We have dozens of pain killers which are not opioid based, what do you mean? From the top of my head NSAIDs can be used, and Metamizole for example is as effective as morphium.
you got nsaids, metamizole, acetoaminophen, duolexitine. And you got a couple of more that work for neuropathic pain. The biggest problem with nsaids is that they cause bleeding and kidney failure, ulcers hence can cause stomach cancer.
Here is a site you can use too see how most pharmaco therapy is lacking.
Yeah, I could see this being true if there was really _nothing else_ I could possibly be doing with my time that is worthy. But there are a lot of worthy things I could be doing with my time.
Pharma has shown itself untrustworthy too many times, and in general I don't trust big institutions with financial entanglements to have my best interest at heart.
I do have personal experience with some plant medicines being extremely effective at certain things. While most of the time it's hard to prove, some are so obvious that it makes me open to the possibility that the less obvious ones also may be helping. I use plant medicines all the time because they are free or cheap and relatively harmless like real food, in fact they often are food.
That said if I get in a car accident I will go to the hospital. It's not all or nothing.
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