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This is still compatible with the hygiene hypothesis. It could be that your wife grew up in a “too clean” environment and hence her immune system became hyperse
by outlace 9y ago
This is still compatible with the hygiene hypothesis. It could be that your wife grew up in a “too clean” environment and hence her immune system became hypersensitive to substances that anybody in a less clean developing country would have no issues with. She has legitimate allergies; the hygiene hypothesis just tries to explain why many people get allergies in the first place.
- learnstats2 9y agoA hypothesis which permits compatibility with any reality it is of limited practical value. If it's ultimately not falsifiable, it's not science.
- outlace 9y agoIt’s a completely testable and falsifiable hypothesis. The original commenter seemed to be dismissing the hypothesis based on an anecdote that he thought falsified the hypothesis and I was pointing out that it does not. Of course any hypothesis that cannot be falsified is not worth entertaining.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoHow would you falsify your hypothesis that the wife's allergies are from a "too clean" environment?
- outlace 9y agoYou can’t, in general, test something that already happened. Moreover, given the immune system is a complex system with some degree of randomness involved, it would probably be impossible to prove that any particular person’s allergies were caused by a too clean environment. But we can certainly study it at a population level and it can be falsified with populations. This is similar to smoking. Smoking is a good explanation for a large amount of the cases of lung disease at the population level and is falsifiable at that level. But it is impossible to say that smoking caused a particular person’s lung cancer. So my original comment of “I wonder if...” is just that. A musing, not a hypothesis. I can’t prove anything for a particular person. But maybe more people will be aware of the hygiene hypothesis and might take it into consideration.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoSo how would you falsify “the population with his wife’s allergy often get it from sources other than a too clean environment”?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]