3 ms·
> do the actual treatment, don't mess around with diet No, you should do both. Telling people not to improve their diets is just as irresponsible as telling pe
by lend000 3y ago
> do the actual treatment, don't mess around with diet
No, you should do both. Telling people not to improve their diets is just as irresponsible as telling people not to take an effective medication. Especially in cases where there aren't effective treatments available, like some autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders.
This comes with all the obvious disclaimers like do your own research, make sure there is at least some evidence for the diet's overall healthiness and interactions so that it can't make things worse.
Personally, I effectively cured a 2-year stint with long covid through diet (essentially a low sugar paleo diet). Within a few months I was able to exercise again without a fight or flight reaction after years of no improvement. Doctors (including one who was also battling long covid) told me there was nothing they could do to help, but they hoped that some of the experimental treatments like stellate ganglion block might eventually bear fruit. I could have waited around with a much lower quality of life, but instead I started the very difficult diet, and it paid off. There's plenty of snake oil out there, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The world isn't black and white.
> very effective treatment which is mildly uncomfortable and time-consuming.
I'm not certain, but it seems like you are implying that diet is the easier choice. This is almost never the case, broadly speaking. Perhaps it's different in your specific community. The difficulty of sticking to a diet and knowing what foods should actually be included and excluded from a diet is probably the most significant hurdle to treating conditions that could benefit from diet (especially early onset conditions related to overall health). This is mostly a consequence of what's available and affordable in America, but is nonetheless a significant setback for recommending diets.
But where a good diets truly shine is in prevention. Just due to how unhealthy the modern American diet is, it's pretty easy to find benefit, so that should be a starting point alongside exercise when you don't have a cure-in-a-bottle handy.
- kyleyeats 3y agoThe diet combined with the treatment does make things worse in the case of the condition I'm talking about. The world isn't black and white over here either. It's not cancer stakes but there are lots of people making themselves miserable with this "do both" approach.
- lend000 3y agoThat's an important distinction that you should put next to your "do not mess with diet" advice (if the diet interacts with the treatment). Most diets I would consider to be healthy and balanced are unlikely to interact with any safe drug.
- kyleyeats 3y agoNo, it's not. When diet is the treatment, they call it that. There's only a distinction when some huckster like you comes along.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoThe problem with "improve your diet"-type advice is that dietary requirements vary wildly from person to person. What's good for you is often not good for someone else—even among two people with the same conditions! Like, some basic dietary guidelines (e.g., eat less Burger King) are more or less universally helpful, but the specifics are far from it. I know people with autoimmune conditions who swear by gluten-free diets; I also know that when my Crohn's is mad at me one of the only things I can stomach is Wheat Thins. I also think casting diets as preventative is only useful in the context of certain conditions. Eating well will shield you against type II diabetes, for example, but not multiple sclerosis. Sometimes you really do just need Actual Fucking Medicine. Luckily there are fewer and fewer conditions that truly lack available treatments.
- lend000 3y ago> Luckily there are fewer and fewer conditions that truly lack available treatments. A significant proportion of autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders are still very untreatable. And casting (reasonably balanced) diets as preventative is almost always useful for anything that isn't a genetic certainty. I strongly disagree with your counterexample. MS, for example, is strongly correlated with environmental exposure [0]. Your diet is a constant and cumulative source of environmental exposure if you're eating normal American food all the time (pesticides, genotoxic compounds in processed foods [1], carcinogenic fats, hormones, and dense refined carb spikes with little fiber). Eating healthy is absolutely useful advice if you have some familial risk of M.S. Worst case? You get it anyways, but are healthier overall. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6444694/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6444694/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15914214/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15914214/
- snapplebobapple 3y agoMs as the counter exam0le choice was amusing to me because dr. Terry wahls reversed hers with diet and currently does research on a diet protocol to fix ms: https://terrywahls.com/ https://terrywahls.com/