Alicorn comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (266)
I predict with p=0.95 that you have at least one micronutrient deficiency which is greatly contributing to your depression, and that starting to take a multivitamin regularly would be enormously to your benefit. I predict with p=0.6 that you are specifically deficient in thiamine, and that a single dose of sulbutiamine (a molecule that crosses the blood-brain barrier and then breaks into two thiamine molecules) would cause a large and sudden reduction in your depression. I am basing this on my own experience with thiamine deficiency (caused by T1 diabetes), which produced in me a specific type of apathy which I recognize in your comments.
Unless you either lied about taking a multivitamin to your current doctor, or ignored their advice to take one, fire him or her and find a new one. Also, thoroughly research every drug you're currently taking. At a minimum, search for the name of each one on PubMed, skim the first few pages of titles and read some of the abstracts. Don't adjust anything without consulting a qualified doctor, but do make sure to have that consultation.
Following up on this may be the most important thing you ever do.
EDIT: One other thing - if you're on antidepressants, you should be getting blood work, of the "large checklist of tests" variety, done on a regular basis. Make sure your TSH has been tested at least once in the past two years (result will be interesting with p=0.1, but very interesting if it is).
I'm with wnoise, but I have a question to clarify my position.
How many diagnoses do you expect a competent physician to get wrong? I would say that more than 1 in 20 is at least reasonable. However, without meeting CronoDAS, or performing tests of any kind, based purely on the scant evidence in his posts, you have diagnosed him with a micronutrient deficiency, and have a confidence of 95% in your diagnosis. Seriously? What's your prior? Even for thiamine, a 60% confidence that this near-stranger is deficient in it seems dramatically too high.
I expect physicians to be bewildered rather a lot. I spent years severely anemic. My father is an MD, my uncle is an MD, I saw a variety of doctors during this time, I was eating cups and cups and cups of ice every single day and was unremittingly tired and ghostly pale, partway through I became a vegetarian - and it took the Red Cross's little machine that goes beep to figure out that maybe I wasn't getting enough iron. I have a vast host of symptoms less serious than that which no doctor, med student, or random interlocutor has been able to offer plausible guesses about.
I expect bewildered people to make things up.
Agreed. Even if they don't make things up, the responsible thing to do is to iterate through harmless or nearly-harmless treatments for conditions that the physician thinks are unlikely, but more likely than any other ideas he or she has.
This is exactly the opposite problem; not being at all bewildered or in doubt, despite a paucity of evidence. Doctors do that too.
Both making things up and jumping to conclusions happen because doctors are humans and are wired to see patterns, whether or not they exist. While we're busy refining the art of human rationality, we ought to try to curb that behavior.