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Because this smacks of the same logic that people use to deduce things like "homeopathy works." Develop a hypothesis. Find a few people on the internet who supp

Because this smacks of the same logic that people use to deduce things like "homeopathy works." Develop a hypothesis. Find a few people on the internet who support it. Badah bing badah boom you are now a quack. The big problem with the GP's "logic" here is that, at least according to cursory googling (the best kind!), plenty of women with CF do report having thick vaginal mucous. Any doctor will tell you that a given disease can present many different ways. It's a terrible idea to reason from your own personal experience with a disease to how the disease works in general.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Except you have it backwards. I didn't develop a hypothesis and look for a few internet people to support it. Instead, I did what worked and then tried to understand why it worked. Thick mucus tends to be poor quality mucus. Mucus is supposed to be viscous. Women self reporting on vaginal mucus also fail to distinguish vaginal "goopiness" from mucus. This is why i paid attention to anecdotal evidence that lack of vaginal mucus was ruining their sex lives. This was pretty uniformly reported. It's possible there is some sex worker or fetish club member out there with CF who has sex with multiple men every day and is just not admitting it for done reason. But I spent several years on multiple CF lists and the consesus was CF causes vaginal dryness and this harms women's sex lives. Your casual dismissal also fails to explain how an excess of mucus causes a compromised immune system. It seems obvious on the face of it that a lack of healthy mucus would be a problem because an important element of our immune system would basically be missing. Mucus is a gating system. It's like saying "We have too many illegal immigrants in this country because Trump not only built his wall, he made many layers of fencing to go with it, which makes it easier than ever for them to get through. It was better when there was no wall. That did a better job of keeping them out." (Not intended as political commentary. Hopefully just a readily relatable example of logic fail -- more fencing should not be worse for keeping out unwanted invaders.)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but no matter what you say, your experience on forums is not going to move my priors very much. Plenty of people hear plenty of things on forums. It's not an efficient way of obtaining reliable scientific knowledge. Every other person has their pet cause where they know better than doctors because they did X or Y and it helped, and they found other people on the internet who agreed with them. It's a common story, and 99.9% of the time it's incorrect. People don't engage with you on this because it's pointless. You're not going to convince anyone who isn't predisposed to accepting your story, the same way a religious person who claims a divine experience isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't already want such a story to be true. In the same way, me telling Paul that he was probably hallucinating on the road to Damascus because he was dehydrated is not going to make him stop preaching the word of god. You don't have good evidence to present, besides hearsay about other internet people's anecdotal experiences. Read that last sentence. That type of thing is about three or four degrees removed from solid evidence. Surely you can understand how unconvincing this is going to be to a disinterested third party?
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Emphasizing how very much you are convinced I'm hallucinating is not an explanation for how too much mucus makes more logical sense as an immune system failure than too little. It also cites zero sources. Also, if you are so disinterested, why waste any time replying to me? If I'm a nutter, downvote, flag and move on. Let someone else talk to me who doesn't think I'm a total waste of their time.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
      You asked in another part of the thread why people are downvoting and not engaging. I explained why I downvoted, and why, if I hadn't engaged, that would have been. If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question. Also, I find myself congenitally unable to let anti-scientific behavior go without comment when it comes before me. I don't know enough about CF to know why it works how it works. But I do know enough about science and have enough experience with people with "unique" theories of disease to know that almost always, the prevailing scientific wisdom is less wrong.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Except you have it backwards. I didn't develop a hypothesis and look for a few internet people to support it. Instead, I did what worked and then tried to understand why it worked. Thick mucus tends to be poor quality mucus. Mucus is supposed to be viscous. Women self reporting on vaginal mucus also fail to distinguish vaginal "goopiness" from mucus. This is why i paid attention to anecdotal evidence that lack of vaginal mucus was ruining their sex lives. This was pretty uniformly reported. It's possible there is some sex worker or fetish club member out there with CF who has sex with multiple men every day and is just not admitting it for done reason. But I spent several years on multiple CF lists and the consesus was CF causes vaginal dryness and this harms women's sex lives. Your casual dismissal also fails to explain how an excess of mucus causes a compromised immune system. It seems obvious on the face of it that a lack of healthy mucus would be a problem because an important element of our immune system would basically be missing. Mucus is a gating system. It's like saying "We have too many illegal immigrants in this country because Trump not only built his wall, he made many layers of fencing to go with it, which makes it easier than ever for them to get through. It was better when there was no wall. That did a better job of keeping them out." (Not intended as political commentary. Hopefully just a readily relatable example of logic fail -- more fencing should not be worse for keeping out unwanted invaders.)

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
I'm sorry, but no matter what you say, your experience on forums is not going to move my priors very much. Plenty of people hear plenty of things on forums. It's not an efficient way of obtaining reliable scientific knowledge. Every other person has their pet cause where they know better than doctors because they did X or Y and it helped, and they found other people on the internet who agreed with them. It's a common story, and 99.9% of the time it's incorrect. People don't engage with you on this because it's pointless. You're not going to convince anyone who isn't predisposed to accepting your story, the same way a religious person who claims a divine experience isn't going to convince anyone who doesn't already want such a story to be true. In the same way, me telling Paul that he was probably hallucinating on the road to Damascus because he was dehydrated is not going to make him stop preaching the word of god. You don't have good evidence to present, besides hearsay about other internet people's anecdotal experiences. Read that last sentence. That type of thing is about three or four degrees removed from solid evidence. Surely you can understand how unconvincing this is going to be to a disinterested third party?
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Emphasizing how very much you are convinced I'm hallucinating is not an explanation for how too much mucus makes more logical sense as an immune system failure than too little. It also cites zero sources. Also, if you are so disinterested, why waste any time replying to me? If I'm a nutter, downvote, flag and move on. Let someone else talk to me who doesn't think I'm a total waste of their time.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    You asked in another part of the thread why people are downvoting and not engaging. I explained why I downvoted, and why, if I hadn't engaged, that would have been. If you don't want the answer, don't ask the question. Also, I find myself congenitally unable to let anti-scientific behavior go without comment when it comes before me. I don't know enough about CF to know why it works how it works. But I do know enough about science and have enough experience with people with "unique" theories of disease to know that almost always, the prevailing scientific wisdom is less wrong.