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Comment by AnthonBerg | Hacker News Reader

I have the feeling that these things we never can pin down the cause for - like schizophrenia, MS, and psoriasis - I don't think they are caused by any one thing. Perhaps we have been fooled by the almost one-to-one mapping of reason-to-illness that we have seen so far. Schizophrenia, MS, and also psoriasis, are complex systems that manifest from accumlated weaknesses in incredibly complex systems.

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Perhaps, though there is a fascinating link between the three illnesses you mention and vitamin D deficiency.[1] The human body is a complex organism that we are only beginning to understand, but there are a few critical things that the human body absolutely needs to survive and thrive.

In the short-term, we all need adequate food, water, and air. Without this short-term fuel, we die.

In the long-term, vitamin D <rant>misnamed as it is not a vitamin but is actually the most powerful seco-steroid hormone in the body -- a seco-steroid hormone is basically just something in the body that is made from cholesterol and turns genes on and off</rant> optimizes health. If you think about it, it makes sense intuitively that vitamin D would be so critical. Most living things have adapted to make something useful from the sun's radiation. Plants use it to feed themselves, and most animals use it to help generate vitamin D.

[1] Sorry for the crazy-long-and-to-a-google-doc link -- I didn't want to give the PDF-link and the original New England Journal of Medicine HTML page is subscriber-only: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o13HNdtJjWwJ:c...

You might say up front you are ranting about data published in a very respected publication.

Key takeaway quote from the article you linked:

[Take] 1000 IU of vitamin D3 or 3000 IU of vitamin D2 per day."

The 1-1 connection viewpoint has always bugged me. It assumes that the existing system has a "correct" state, that it has been off-set by a single item, and that that single item exists in isolation from external influences.

Yeah. Sure. Because things in our bodies never interact with each other.

Considering its complexity, the system is incredibly deterministic. Small perturbations can wreak havoc, and have been fingered for so many disorders.

Just because the etiology of a disorder hasn't yet been determined does not mean it won't be.

Quite so. Cancer, for example, is a catch-all term which is more a genre of diseases rather than a specific disease. Our understanding of biology and disease is still fairly primitive.

Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even in the study, they found only 49% of people with schizophrenia were infected.

That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.

Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind.

It's really weird to characterize diseases by their effects rather than their cause, because then you don't really have a disease per se, but rather a pattern of symptoms that may or may not always have the same cause.

One major example is SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which appears to be little more than a medical term for "the baby died of asphyxiation and we can't figure out how".

"we can't figure out"

That's also synonymous with "it's a viral infection".

There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months.

The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.

this being the second time i've heard the term "catch-all" in this thread, note that words in areas outside of medicine have a similar porosity. our understanding of many things is still naive.

Having a "feeling" and then stating such as fact doesn't make sense.

Perhaps it is because there is a separate substance called the soul that is affected by these ailments, and since it is not a biological system is unaffected by our biological methods.

A popular idea? No. Fits the evidence well? Yes.

What evidence does that hypothesis fit? What predictive value does it have?

A) Biological solutions do not work B) Psychological solutions work a bit better, but they tend to be behaviorist solutions

So, there is at least a progression of greater effectiveness the more we move towards "soulish" solutions.

C) Prediction is the better we understand what the soul needs, just like understanding our psychological needs, the more effective we will be at healing problems with the soul.

Spiritual solutions have not been demonstrated to work any more than biological solutions have — less so, actually, since there are drugs for treating schizophrenia with some degree of efficacy. We can't say, "Thing X is not proven, therefore Unproven Thing Y must be true" — that's illogical.

I know people who have successfully exorcised demons:

http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2007/10/04/cosmetic-surgery-...

Plus, how much have you looked into things such as spiritual disciplines? Meditation comes up here on HN quite often, which would be one spiritual solution to psychological problems.

The absence of evidence is not equivalent to evidence.

I maintain there is positive evidence as well as negative.

For instance, having a supportive social group has a significant impact on psychological wellbeing. What is the biological or chemical mechanism in this case?

I have no clue. That's not my area of expertise. I bet if you're interested there's quite a bit of research on it, though. What are you getting at?

I wouldn't exclude that reason myself. Can you elaborate, though?

One point is that the causal chain should largely be reversed when we look at the relation between biological phenomena and different psychological ailments. Treating the chemicals should be considered mostly treating symptoms. Unfortunately, many children today are over medicated because doctors think that if they've removed the symptom (i.e. ADD) they've fixed the problem.

Second, we should look at what the soul needs. For example, if the soul is a separate, higher substance it will not be satiated by a lower substance. As Jesus says, "man does not live by bread alone." The only thing at the level of a soul is another soul. So, souls need relationships with other souls. Theology also comes into the picture here, since theology claims the only thing higher than a human soul is God. So, ultimate satiation for our soul is found in God. The medieval church has extensive experience and spiritual disciplines aimed at connecting our souls to God. Thus, theology becomes an important aspect of psychology.

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