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I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep
by zby 5y ago
I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep discovering that a thing is correlated with one bad symptom - but the lack of said thing is correlated with a different bad symptom and we believe that there is one perfect level that thing that would let us live with neither of these bad things. There probably isn't.
It probably used to be a good abstraction - because we had so many things that obviously harmed us so we tended to remove them from our lives and that was improvement. But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things - what is left is all the exceptions.
- Hedepig 5y agoPerhaps slightly tangential - I listened to a set of lectures on genetics[0], one of the biggest takeaways for me was that although it's apparent diet is one of the largest[1] (I forget if it is the largest) factors in cancer rates, we aren't sure which foods in particular cause dramatic increases or decreases in cancer probability [0] - https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-genetics-dna-genes-and-their-real-world-applications.html https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti... [1] - we believe it is a large factor due to the fact migrants adopt the same cancer rate when they join the native population
- kritiko 5y agoI thought we had some ideas - e.g. high sodium diets in east asia have been implicated in gastric cancers.
- jack_pp 5y ago> But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things I don't agree, sugar is still as popular as ever and age old marketing scams like fruit smoothies being healthy still dominate the health narrative. People continue binging pizza and burgers and wash it down with soda even though they know it's obviously bad for them. Obesity is a big problem in the west
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoIsn't brake dust everywhere?
- axg11 5y agoI suspect the mechanism driving this goes all the way down to basic biology. Everything is a spectrum. Take gene regulation networks or protein-protein interaction networks. They are both extremely complex and nonlinear. Perturbations to one gene can lead to positive or negative regulation of a cascade of other genes, as well as negative or positive feedback loops. For these networks, there are many such "steady" states where the combination of gene expression leads to a healthy cell/organism. Biological networks also have a high degree of redundancy with many proteins having overlapping function. There is no such thing as a universal healthy state because any single cell can be in a wide spectrum of states but still function "good enough". I think the ultimate goal of medicine is to understand how each change in state, at the cell or organ level, changes state at the organism level. With that knowledge we can "tune" health in the right direction.
- JacobThreeThree 5y agoIronically, the very modern technology that has assisted us, has itself become a leading cause of death: medical errors and false positives
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoWhat are the takeaway implications of that for consumers of medicine? Understand statistics? Don't be first to try new tech? Whenever I try to second-guess my doctors I become hopeless about how hard it is to get them to state, and/or to find for myself, sources for their conclusions. Also, a world in which nobody was willing to be first to try new tech seems like it would probably be worse for everybody.
- ggeorgovassilis 5y ago> I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state Well into my 30s I was in perfect health: long endurance races, excellent eyesight, all vital KPIs on target and uninterrupted sleep. To me it felt like the only desirable state to be in and doctors agreed.