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> the case highlights the need to educate the public on the dangers of using drugs in ways that they are not prescribed. Over 5,000 people died last year from

by breck 6y ago

> the case highlights the need to educate the public on the dangers of using drugs in ways that they are not prescribed. Over 5,000 people died last year from antidepressant overdoses thanks to the medical establishment. I view people like mushroom guy as heroes who risk their lives to pursue leads and try and save millions while the medical establishment stumbles it's way around, being careful never to stray too far from the bank. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/895959/antidepressant-overdose-deaths-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/895959/antidepressant-ov...

whoomp12342 6y ago
Lets not glorify self harm.
- breck 6y ago
  Pretty sure I'm doing the opposite. Now I think there should be a safer, collaborative way to do biohacking, but BigPharma and the medical establishment is absolutely awful at making us healthier, so turning to them is not the answer. Source: spent a couple years in medical research.
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    Jesus. The only medical professional in the thread is being downvoted. Fuck this gay ass website full of fucking morons.
- edoceo 6y ago
  Maybe they are glorifying the scientist who did the experiment on themselves, knowing the risks? That kind of glory has been directed at other researchers.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
It isn't heroics. It's desperation. There are ways to self experiment that make some sense and there are a lot of ways to self experiment that are a good way to get harmed with little hope of upside and describing people who get badly messed up this way as "heroes" is probably a good way to increase the odds of more people getting badly messed up. I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation as an alternative to "You are so completely and thoroughly fucked and no one will help you" but I really don't want to see something like this glorified as heroics because that will tend to get a lot of pushback against more reasonable methods of self experimentation and make it harder to find a constructive path forward.
- breck 6y ago
  > I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation Yes! 100% agree.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    As long as you don't expect your society to also pay to keep you alive when that self-experimentation very predictably goes wrong.
- gfodor 6y ago
  Depends if you think heroes are only known after the fact or if actions themselves are heroic. If this guy stumbled upon a permanent cure for depression, we'd be calling him a hero.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    This would not be the first time that fungus or other plants grew inside the human body. I remember reading about a boy who had a seed get blown into his eye and it sprouted. When I used to be active on CF lists, someone got the bright idea to inhale some kind of oil using their nebulizer and ended up with pneumonia. You can readily google "oil induced pneumonia" and get articles about lipoid pneumonia. It's a well known phenomenon that inhaling fats or oils blocks the lungs and can cause pneumonia. The reason we don't like people doing self experimentation is because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works and do damn little in the way of due diligence to look stuff up beforehand. I have difficulty imagining that I would inject any kind of fungus into my body for any reason. That's just not a good way to extract the active ingredient he was looking to ingest, which can be ingested orally just fine from what I gather. And I don't think we would be calling him a hero. Most likely, we would be claiming "He got lucky" and "It's a wild coincidence -- stranger things have happened" and wouldn't even bother to commission a study to see if it is replicable.
    - breck 6y ago
      > because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works I agree with this. It took me a solid year of significant studying to get to the point where I could comfortably read a medical research paper, and that was coming from an engineering background. However, when I look back at my life, some of my most impactful contributions have come from doing dumb risky things in fields I knew nothing about. I think the Kay quote "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" applies here. Novices have a different perspective, which sure can be dangerous, but also gives them an 80 IQ point advantage. Anyway, I agree with your point that it would be nice to make it safer to do biohacking, but at the same time I think we shouldn't be too quick to discourage it, as it's actually a smart strategy for society to have outsiders try things that would seem dumb from an insider's perspective.

by breck 6y ago

whoomp12342 6y ago

Lets not glorify self harm.

breck 6y ago
Pretty sure I'm doing the opposite. Now I think there should be a safer, collaborative way to do biohacking, but BigPharma and the medical establishment is absolutely awful at making us healthier, so turning to them is not the answer. Source: spent a couple years in medical research.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Jesus. The only medical professional in the thread is being downvoted. Fuck this gay ass website full of fucking morons.
edoceo 6y ago
Maybe they are glorifying the scientist who did the experiment on themselves, knowing the risks? That kind of glory has been directed at other researchers.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

It isn't heroics. It's desperation. There are ways to self experiment that make some sense and there are a lot of ways to self experiment that are a good way to get harmed with little hope of upside and describing people who get badly messed up this way as "heroes" is probably a good way to increase the odds of more people getting badly messed up. I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation as an alternative to "You are so completely and thoroughly fucked and no one will help you" but I really don't want to see something like this glorified as heroics because that will tend to get a lot of pushback against more reasonable methods of self experimentation and make it harder to find a constructive path forward.

breck 6y ago
> I wish there was more support for reasonable self experimentation Yes! 100% agree.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  As long as you don't expect your society to also pay to keep you alive when that self-experimentation very predictably goes wrong.
gfodor 6y ago
Depends if you think heroes are only known after the fact or if actions themselves are heroic. If this guy stumbled upon a permanent cure for depression, we'd be calling him a hero.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  This would not be the first time that fungus or other plants grew inside the human body. I remember reading about a boy who had a seed get blown into his eye and it sprouted. When I used to be active on CF lists, someone got the bright idea to inhale some kind of oil using their nebulizer and ended up with pneumonia. You can readily google "oil induced pneumonia" and get articles about lipoid pneumonia. It's a well known phenomenon that inhaling fats or oils blocks the lungs and can cause pneumonia. The reason we don't like people doing self experimentation is because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works and do damn little in the way of due diligence to look stuff up beforehand. I have difficulty imagining that I would inject any kind of fungus into my body for any reason. That's just not a good way to extract the active ingredient he was looking to ingest, which can be ingested orally just fine from what I gather. And I don't think we would be calling him a hero. Most likely, we would be claiming "He got lucky" and "It's a wild coincidence -- stranger things have happened" and wouldn't even bother to commission a study to see if it is replicable.
  - breck 6y ago
    > because a lot of people know shockingly little about how their body works I agree with this. It took me a solid year of significant studying to get to the point where I could comfortably read a medical research paper, and that was coming from an engineering background. However, when I look back at my life, some of my most impactful contributions have come from doing dumb risky things in fields I knew nothing about. I think the Kay quote "A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" applies here. Novices have a different perspective, which sure can be dangerous, but also gives them an 80 IQ point advantage. Anyway, I agree with your point that it would be nice to make it safer to do biohacking, but at the same time I think we shouldn't be too quick to discourage it, as it's actually a smart strategy for society to have outsiders try things that would seem dumb from an insider's perspective.