Wakarimahen
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Wakarimahen has not written any posts yet.
Wakarimahen has not written any posts yet.
Current prior: nothing has helped so far, so the odds of something she missed ended up being useful is pretty low.
This assumes she's good at sifting through the massive expanse of information available, and good at implementing the suggestions therein. These are two extremely questionable assumptions. Knowing nothing about her except that she has severe fibromyalgia and that she's the friend of a frequent poster on LW--two factors that hardly seem very relevant, and I'd put the likelihood of those two assumptions holding up to be very low. Quite bluntly, most people have no idea what's really out there. The Internet is a vast space.
All possible conventional and alternative medicine? I doubt it. This is a mind-destroying sentence if I ever saw one. I'd suggest re-wording it to "she's tried a ton of different approaches both from conventional and alternative medicine".
First thing to be said: Fibromyalgia is one of those health issues where there are no widely adopted hypotheses for the base mechanism at work. This means, quite simply, that there is little hope for targeting it specifically. It's not a case where e.g. your lips are chapped and your knuckles are splitting, and one of the first places you look is hydration--more water, more trace minerals, etc. Instead it's a health issue where you have... (read more)
Let's just delete this thread and then pretend this never happened...
One should also distinguish between different kinds of alcohol. Unpasteurized beer or organic dry wine, for example, I imagine is way less likely to be a problem for one's health than cheap beer or wine with all sorts of additives and shortcuts with the process.
Alcohol causes temporary loss of motor control and some brain functions, and this is exactly the point. Any mistakes can be blamed on 'being drunk', and thus people are able to cast of the shackles of social inhibition, and enjoy themselves more unimpeded. Our society is rather oppressive when it comes to making mistakes or looking 'low status' in normal situations, so alcohol is the perfect way for many people to compensate, and allow themselves temporary spans of time where they're less afraid to make mistakes or look incompetent (and I would argue this general fear of making mistakes or looking incompetent is one of the main plagues in society, preventing all sorts of people from improving their lives).
Call it placebo if you want, but placebo is great if it works. Anything is great if it works.
Yeah. Slightly fed up is too fed up. It's never useful to be fed up, as far as I've ever seen. I've read a decent number of Yvain's posts, and he's always come off as rather immune to getting 'fed up' or 'annoyed' or anything, so I thought it was sort of out of character, and not in a good way.
I've read a decent number of your posts, and it seems a bit out of character for you to generalize so heavily, and use all caps to describe everyone on LW as having a sentiment similar to, "Doctors are incredibly stupid and just by knowing about this one study I can totally outdo all of them."
I know you don't really mean it literally, but it may be worth pointing out that that sort of thing is just another one of those epistemically hazardous and unhygienic habits that should be done away with.
What, you didn't think doctors had medical myths too? Although Yvain seems to have voided your particular example, it should be pointed out that there are a ridiculous number of doctors in any first-world country, and based on what we know about the sanity waterline it seems absurd to assume anything other than, "Most of them are probably rather irrational."
I would define it as something like, "The course of action one would take if they had perfect knowledge." The only problem with this definition seems to be that one's utility function not only defines what would be the best course of action, but also defines what would be the second best, and third, etc.
I would say "utility function" takes all possible actions one could take at each moment, and ranks them from 'worst idea' to 'best idea'. A coherent agent would have no disagreement between these rankings from moment to moment, but agents with akrasia, such as humans in the modern environment, have utility functions that cycle back and forth in a contradictory fashion, where at one moment the best action to take is at a later time a bad choice (such as people who find staying up late reading Reddit the most fun option, but then always regret it in the morning when they have to wake up early for work).
I'm surprised as well. I expected to be downvoted to -2 or so pretty quickly, and stay around there.
As for your disagreements, I should stress that what I said is perhaps the absolute most important thing for the average person with a health issue like that to hear. All too many people get hung up on trying to target the problem specifically, when they're dealing with an issue where doing so is not practical. Day after day, they ask, "What causes fibromyalgia? What are the new treatments suggested for it?" They remain fixated on these questions, while they sweep all sorts of other symptoms under the rug--random symptoms like headaches or splitting... (read more)