3 ms·
> But pretending there is zero detrimental effects is wishful thinking and will lead to people abusing the thing, believing it's just funny candy, and they may
by aeturnum 5y ago
> But pretending there is zero detrimental effects is wishful thinking and will lead to people abusing the thing, believing it's just funny candy, and they may end up damaged.
I think you're mostly reacting to the framing of this headline, which isn't accurately stating the finding of the study.
It would be more accurate to say the study "did not find any short or long term negative effects" which is not the same as a positive assertion that such effects do not exist. This is a similar level of safety as you might find with aspirin or acetaminophen - both of which could be fairly described as not having short or long term negative effects and which can have serious health consequences if used incorrectly [edit: I said "if abused" which is the wrong way to put it].
> There is no such thing as a free lunch. Powerful products have powerful effects, and this means some harm can exist.
There's nothing in this study that contradicts this idea - because studies like this don't claim to detect every form of harm. Instead, they look for particular forms of relatively objective harm. Another example to consider would be SSRIs: they tend to increase suicide attempts when patients start taking them. That's the kind of harm this study would find! But - even if a patient doesn't experience suicidal ideation - no doctor would suggest that it logically follows that patient should certainly go on SSRIs. The choice is always more complex than that.
- darth_avocado 5y ago> did not find any short or long term negative effects I think what the original comment refers to is that measuring long term side effects is kind of impossible without waiting a long time and wishful thinking.
- aeturnum 5y agoI mean, I understand why someone might say that, but I think that's actually a critique of western medicine in general rather than this study in particular. In that I think it's understood that studies like this are measuring harms with commonly understood (but hard to rigorously define because you don't know what you don't know) limits. We've found new harms for medicines or treatments many times, and in each case we generally had previous studies that missed those harms. It's always possible, so calling it out about mushrooms in particular feels odd because the same critique applies to the western approach to every other medicine.
- Natsu 5y agoYou keep saying 'western' medicine. Is this to imply that some other method exists to study long term harms? I suppose long traditional use might, but this doesn't seem meaningfully different from running medical testing over a long period of time.
- aeturnum 5y ago> Is this to imply that some other method exists to study long term harms? Not that I trust? But I think it's important to note that this study has epistemological value within a certain set of axioms and not everyone in the world agrees with those axioms. The reason it's important to say is that, to some degree, I feel like BiteCode_dev could be questioning an underlying axiom of western medicine (i.e. how to think about anecdotal harms we can't find in population studies). The western tradition has an opinion about the question, but none of us have to accept that opinion, but if we don't we should be honest that we disagree with the tradition in general as opposed to finding a flaw in this particular study.