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I would frame it in the opposite direction: having a serious illness is correlated with low levels of Vitamin D. People with a serious illness may stay inside m

I would frame it in the opposite direction: having a serious illness is correlated with low levels of Vitamin D. People with a serious illness may stay inside more, and go outside less. It's possible that "low levels" of Vitamin D are still within the healthy range, and they merely are an indication of how much time the person has spent outside during the day. In other words, it's possible that Vitamin D is pure symptom. It's not even necessarily the case that going outside is healthy, but that healthy people tend to go outside more.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
black_puppydog 6y ago
> It's not even necessarily the case that going outside is healthy, but that healthy people tend to go outside more. This is a departure from the discussion of supplementing vitamin D though, isn't it? I guess the treatment "go out and do sports" is a very different one compared to "X amount of vitamin D per day as a supplement" and the former may indeed be healthy, while the latter may not be, even though they both result in higher levels of vitamin D.
- fuckyah 6y ago
  The point is, you can’t just supplement everything and just eat starch and sit before the computer all day. It’s a healthy balanced lifestyle that matters.
- scott_s 6y ago
  > This is a departure from the discussion of supplementing vitamin D though, isn't it? I don't think so, no. If my hypothesis is correct, the problem is not that they didn't go outside and play sports. The problem is that they are sick, and sick people don't go outside as much. Forget Vitamin D for a moment. Imagine that every time you were outside for an hour, the Outside Fairy granted you one Outside Token. Over the course of a month, it's reasonable to assume that healthy people would have more Outside Tokens than sick people. But these Outside Tokens obviously would have no causal effect on whether or not people are sick. Giving sick people Outside Tokens would obviously not help them - their problem is that they are sick. They have less Outside Tokens because being sick makes it more difficult to be outside for an hour. In other words, the arrow of causation is being sick -> less Outside Tokens, and not being sick -> more Outside Tokens. If that's the case, then Outside Tokens are irrelevant to treating the sick people. If, say, they have cancer, you should ignore the Outside Tokens and treat the cancer with all of the standard means we have of treating cancer. They hypothesis is that "low levels of Vitamin D" are just those Outside Tokens. (Yes, when Vitamin D levels are low enough, that can cause other kinds of health problems. But this hypothesis is that what we're measuring as "low" is still within the healthy range. How do we know when it's not in the healthy range? When it tends to cause the kinds of problems we are more confident are directly linked to low levels of Vitamin D.)
  - nradov 6y ago
    Perhaps sick people should be going outside more? There doesn't appear to be any reliable clinical evidence of better outcomes for respiratory disease patients who stay inside. Someone ought to run a clinical trial on that.
  - dnh44 6y ago
    That’s very true, but Outside Tokens are really cheap and are low risk so encouraging people to buy them seems like a reasonable hedge to make until the hypothesis can be proven.
    - cortic 6y ago
      So long as it doesn't supplant other real treatments, which it inevitably will within the framework of a recommendation to potentially very ill/desperate people.
m12k 6y ago
"It's not even necessarily the case that going outside is healthy, but that healthy people tend to go outside more." Right, that's why I used the word correlated - while it's not unreasonable to think that having an active lifestyle could cause you to be more healthy, it's pretty much a statistical necessity that the two are correlated, because being very sick precludes you from having a lifestyle like that.
dkersten 6y ago
So low vitamin D is itself a symptom and treating deficiency is just testing a symptom.
cgag 6y ago
I guess you could frame being unwilling to go outside and/or exercise as a chronic illnesses in and of themselves, but otherwise I don't see how anyone would consider this plausible.
treeman79 6y ago
Sun exposure causes me massive inflammation. So yea, I avoid the sun like the plague. Autoimmune condition. Vit D is critically low. I can sort of tolerate a UV index of 1, usually. So I walk a lot in evenings and early mornings. During summer I’m basically trapped in house or gym. This past summer it was just the house.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

black_puppydog 6y ago

> It's not even necessarily the case that going outside is healthy, but that healthy people tend to go outside more. This is a departure from the discussion of supplementing vitamin D though, isn't it? I guess the treatment "go out and do sports" is a very different one compared to "X amount of vitamin D per day as a supplement" and the former may indeed be healthy, while the latter may not be, even though they both result in higher levels of vitamin D.

fuckyah 6y ago
The point is, you can’t just supplement everything and just eat starch and sit before the computer all day. It’s a healthy balanced lifestyle that matters.
scott_s 6y ago
> This is a departure from the discussion of supplementing vitamin D though, isn't it? I don't think so, no. If my hypothesis is correct, the problem is not that they didn't go outside and play sports. The problem is that they are sick, and sick people don't go outside as much. Forget Vitamin D for a moment. Imagine that every time you were outside for an hour, the Outside Fairy granted you one Outside Token. Over the course of a month, it's reasonable to assume that healthy people would have more Outside Tokens than sick people. But these Outside Tokens obviously would have no causal effect on whether or not people are sick. Giving sick people Outside Tokens would obviously not help them - their problem is that they are sick. They have less Outside Tokens because being sick makes it more difficult to be outside for an hour. In other words, the arrow of causation is being sick -> less Outside Tokens, and not being sick -> more Outside Tokens. If that's the case, then Outside Tokens are irrelevant to treating the sick people. If, say, they have cancer, you should ignore the Outside Tokens and treat the cancer with all of the standard means we have of treating cancer. They hypothesis is that "low levels of Vitamin D" are just those Outside Tokens. (Yes, when Vitamin D levels are low enough, that can cause other kinds of health problems. But this hypothesis is that what we're measuring as "low" is still within the healthy range. How do we know when it's not in the healthy range? When it tends to cause the kinds of problems we are more confident are directly linked to low levels of Vitamin D.)
- nradov 6y ago
  Perhaps sick people should be going outside more? There doesn't appear to be any reliable clinical evidence of better outcomes for respiratory disease patients who stay inside. Someone ought to run a clinical trial on that.
- dnh44 6y ago
  That’s very true, but Outside Tokens are really cheap and are low risk so encouraging people to buy them seems like a reasonable hedge to make until the hypothesis can be proven.
  - cortic 6y ago
    So long as it doesn't supplant other real treatments, which it inevitably will within the framework of a recommendation to potentially very ill/desperate people.

m12k 6y ago

"It's not even necessarily the case that going outside is healthy, but that healthy people tend to go outside more." Right, that's why I used the word correlated - while it's not unreasonable to think that having an active lifestyle could cause you to be more healthy, it's pretty much a statistical necessity that the two are correlated, because being very sick precludes you from having a lifestyle like that.

dkersten 6y ago

So low vitamin D is itself a symptom and treating deficiency is just testing a symptom.

cgag 6y ago

I guess you could frame being unwilling to go outside and/or exercise as a chronic illnesses in and of themselves, but otherwise I don't see how anyone would consider this plausible.

treeman79 6y ago

Sun exposure causes me massive inflammation. So yea, I avoid the sun like the plague. Autoimmune condition. Vit D is critically low. I can sort of tolerate a UV index of 1, usually. So I walk a lot in evenings and early mornings. During summer I’m basically trapped in house or gym. This past summer it was just the house.