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Comment by garganzol | Hacker News Reader

Based on my humble experience, I would suggest her to take the walks in the open air. Start from small, then gradually increase. Once she reaches at least 3 km per day, the walking activities should fully rejuvenate her ability to breathe.

This should totally work out. The moderate activities and safe relaxed walks do the miracles for the usual post-pneumonia as well.

Note of caution: avoid walking in masks. A mask impairs the natural ventilation and you would not get the recovery effect. This means you should keep a healthy distance and avoid getting into crowded places.

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> Once she reaches at least 3 km per day, the walking activities should fully rejuvenate her ability to breathe.

And you base that on what? Seems completely arbitrary. You don't know any details of her issues.

Experimentation. Medicine is my life-long interest.

Yes, the exact details are missing. But I gave a solid general advice. Not sure everybody can grasp it being blinded by their own cultural expectations (which are not 100% true after all).

How many double blind experiments did you do with a control group with/without masks? O2 sat levels from any tests I've seen aren't affected by masks, so I'm more than a bit skeptical here.

No tests, sorry. I would gladly make some statistically significant experiments, but I am not in professional medicine. I am more math/computer/physics guy by trade.

From math/physics perspective: mask has a porous structure and stands in a way of the air. So it is clearly adds some resistance to overcome with an additional suction.

Healthy people can provide that suction, so their O2 remains untouched.

Not-so-healthy people may hit the physical limit of their suction and this is the situation when adding an additional barrier (the mask) will lead to O2 decrease.

Buy a $30 O2 saturation monitor.

Put it on your finger.

Wear the mask.

See with your own eyes that you are wrong.

>Wear the mask

You forgot the pneumonia and O2 deficit conditions. You ignored the heat conditions that may make the mask wet and thus increase its air resistance.

Even if I register O2 drop in my finger then I would need control groups to make the experiment statistically significant.

Personal medical measurements and observations have little to no scientific significance. But the ability to calculate the outcome may have big impact in life vs death situations.

I mean, it is physics and logic 1-2-3. Google "wet mask air resistance". What you get? Right, nada.

Again, anecdotally. But - I am a lifelong severe asthmatic. As a kid I was prevented from all running activity. It was the 80s. At 23 I decided, against all advice, to start running. It is now 25 years later and I have run 360 days a year all that time. I still have asthma, but it's just this annoying thing, like hands that grip my lungs a bit. When I get the flu ( I had a terrible flu in January this year ) I do not stop running if I have low/no fever. Running for me is just a walk to others as I do it every day. Since Covid started, so I don't wheeze and sneeze and terrify people and become a social pariah, I take one puff Budesonide, one singulair and a reactine every day. I now have zero asthma and my nasal rhinitis is 70% reduced. (no sniffles just one closed passage as I've had my whole life). I am not recommending anything but building a relationship between my experience, yours and the discussion about this pandemic flu. What is missing from all of these anecdotes is context. This is mine. I am an extremely disciplined runner, I stretch every day ( I have scoliosis which requires it so I remain mostly pain free), I run a Decolinization Think Tank and I live in the Western World and am white and currently upper middle class. I grew up in a trailer with violent neglectful parents and so I also was forced to go through a decade of self work and radical subjectivity was the product . This is my subjectivity, my context and it is directly related to how I recover from disease - or do not. We need numbers and statistics and context.

Totally agree. I am too small of an expert to provide a statically representative numbers. Medicine is my hobby, not a trade by day.

Instead, I'm using a more algebraic, inter-disciplinary approach to medicine trying to infer the outcomes in symbolic form, just like the algebra does. Sorry for non-conventional approach, I clearly understand it goes against the usual expectations of the day. To make things more weird, I do some practice too, including the light surgeries.

>I take one puff Budesonide, one singulair and a reactine every day

In this way you shape the immune response to not attack your tissues. This reduces (or even eliminates) the manifestations of asthma, but does not heal the root cause of it.

Physical activities probably tend to reduce the asthma manifestations too.

Regarding possible healing solution: it is a tough situation as the true reasons of this illness lie inside the genetic code. And this code is hard to change, especially for a grown-up organism (currently it is thought as impossible, though prominent things like CRISP do exist). In this way, asthma is considered impossible to cure.

Regarding COVID: it is not a genetic illness, so it is possible to cure.

So this is my context. Pure algebra with bits of physics, chemistry and biology.

> Medicine is my hobby

Now there's a red flag if I ever saw one!

> I'm using a more algebraic, inter-disciplinary approach to medicine trying to infer the outcomes in symbolic form, just like the algebra does. Sorry for non-conventional approach, I clearly understand it goes against the usual expectations of the day.

WTF?

>WTF?

Symbolic computation is a way to look at the problem domain from a clear analytical standpoint. For example, Noam Chomsky did that for linguistics.

Does such approach constitute a red flag in specific area of human knowledge? Depends on who you ask. In case of Chomsky, his work allowed us to have software compilers and automatic translators between spoken and written languages.

Was he a mad non-conventional scientist? Maybe. But I think he was a prominent innovator cut from above who gave us a great reminder: you cannot undercut or overcome math and algebra. Even in seemingly non-related disciplines such as linguistics or medicine.

> I am too small of an expert to provide a statically representative numbers. Medicine is my hobby, not a trade by day.

In other words, you are not an expert. Be honest with yourself and stop giving people unsolicited medical advice. Please.

Experts don't just do their own studies. They also read studies performed by others, which they base their recommendations on, and have on hand to support their advice.

I'm not a medical expert. But I have my share of successes.

The only reason I voiced a suggestion is because I read desperation behind OP's lines. That's it. A moment of personal weakness caused by overwhelming human compassion.

It's a generalized advice for a general person after suspected pneumonia. It is a good solid recommendation you would get from a practicing doctor, or even from any post-pneumonia patient who experienced shortage of breath.

Please note how helpful it might be in life vs death situations when the list of other options is just empty.

I presume that OP's wife condition is a form of post-pneumonia pulmonary fibrosis. The common wisdom of crowds in western countries suggests that there is no known cure.

However if you care enough to intersect the lingual and cultural barriers, you will soon find out that the effective cures do exist. They come in form of physical rehabilitation: breathing and physical exercises are the main parts of it.

In other words: moving your body will do a good favor for the tissues of your lungs. Open air and unobstructed airflow are big bonuses as well.

Of course you can still deny everything I say. You can still be selfishly fulfilled by your comfortable ignorance.

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