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Comment by rubatuga | Hacker News Reader

This is all pseudoscience peddled as a mental health miracle

Effects of Wim Hof method are very much backed by rigorous scientific studies, see e.g. this is a good overview of the papers, or read them yourself.

https://scienceofparkinsons.com/2020/02/06/wim-hof/

My conclusion is that some effects are very real, according to best available science. But You have to filter that from Wim Hof's persona & explanation style, which to me often feels very hand-wavy & daresay sometimes even esoteric & his explanations/rationalisations are sometimes clearly off. (e.g. he often says that the breathwork/hyperventilation increases amount of oxygen delivered to cells, while in reality it is the opposite due to Bohr effect). But he imo definitely is onto something with the practice.

Except for the peer reviewed paper. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379

IF you read the article there were several science backed confirmations on his method, due emprical tests. Just read the article before comenting. And properly argue your response before send your reply.

Have you tried them and not had results? Because there are a lot of N=1s anecdotes about it working for people, hence the large following he has. Wim’s techniques helped me quit medical marijuana, and drastically improved my productivity and general wellbeing, including my sex-life due to stress-induced ED. It is only one flavor of breathwork, but I think you could be doing a disservice to yourself to label it all a pseudoscience, as if only narrowly-defined “science” has merit for human life, which has existed and thrived long before the double-blind RCT...

>Have you tried them and not had results? Because there are a lot of N=1s anecdotes about it working for people, hence the large following he has.

Placebo, make-believe and self-dellusion often work, especially for the kind of people looking into a miracle cure, which is what such leaders tend to accrue...

That is sometimes true, and sometimes not.

If placebo works as well as many prescription drugs, why is it looked down upon so much?

It's being looked down by the same people that tend to believe in miracle cures. One has to make his own reality true in order to cope with society and scrutiny. Placebo is required in trials for new medicine actually, far from being looked down upon.

I guess placebo was the wrong word here -- as it implies effectiveness.

Replace it with pure make-believe of "feeling better" (as opposed to any physiological improvement).

"Pure make believe"?

Negative thinking can have a detrimental effect on physical health - usually labelled as stress. It seems completely reasonable that positive thinking could have positive heath benefits (assuming that our base line is somewhere in the middle between positive and negative). We should be investigating the mechanisms and encouraging people to do what has positive results.

Homeopathy sounds like a lot quackery to me, but if it works (via placebo or otherwise) and can improve peoples outcomes in a cost effective manner, then I am all for it.

>Negative thinking can have a detrimental effect on physical health - usually labelled as stress. It seems completely reasonable that positive thinking could have positive heath benefits

Sure. But that's neither here nor there, as bathing in ice cold water is not the mechanism - positive thinking is.

The idea that the Hof's regime did it, is what's the dellusion.

When you say "all", do you mean Wim Hof's methods or in general breathing techniques? Do you have links to studies which have conclusively proved that breathing techniques are no better than normal breathing?

What most people who are "anti-breath work" seem to not take into account is ig someone's baseline breathing is good to begin with or not - and simply drawing their attention back to their breath could bring them back to within a normal range; maybe someone's chest is tight and they have abnormal breathing, maybe someone's nose is congested most of time so they mostly mouth breath, etc - but aren't aware their breathing is so constricted/limited until they start to challenge the status quo breathing they've adopted over decades - to finally start feeling what normal baseline of getting adequate/proper oxygen exchange feels like.

I'm sorry Rubatuga, I flagged you. To be fair: I'm not having the best of days, so I might be a bit quicker to flag, but I find this behavior on HN unacceptable.

You make an overgeneralized claim ("this is all") and give no evidence.

There is an extreme amount of evidence on the contrary that the WHM has a lot of novel scientific elements to it. See [1] as an example.

Medlife crisis also did a good nuanced video on it [2].

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6EPuUdIC1E&ab_channel=Medli...

[1] shows only that repeatedly hyperventilating then depriving oneself of oxygen affects various blood parameters. This is not surprising, and not evidence that the more pseudoscientific mind-over-body claims of the Wim Hof method are valid.

According to [1] what I find interesting is:

> In contrast, in trained individuals, practicing the learned breathing techniques resulted in an immediate and profound decrease of pCO2 and bicarbonate, and an increase in pH (reaching up to 7.75 in individual subjects; Fig. 2 and Movie S2), indicating acute respiratory alkalosis.

I'm not a doctor, but since I was part of the study and asked them a lot of questions, I can sort of interpret what they found, which is that your CO2 levels drop (among other things).

With the WHM breathing technique that means you'll be getting into a territory of prolonged oxygen deprivation. In my case I'd be holding my breath for 3 minutes (while completely breathing out beforehand, without the WHM, I could only hold my breath for 20 seconds).

They measured that while doing the WHM your adrenaline level is on average higher than your peak adrenaline level while you're bungee jumping.

> Epinephrine levels in trained individuals were even higher than those reported in a recent study in which acute stress elicited by a bungee jump was found to suppress cytokine production by leukocytes ex vivo stimulated with LPS (13).

It might be in the article, but my suspicion is that this is because of prolonged oxygen deprivation. See also Fig 3A for how high the adrenaline levels got.

So to me it's clear that the WHM gives you a lot of adrenaline. What does adrenaline do? Well, it makes you numb, it acts as a painkiller in the sense that it makes you feel less (again not a doctor, but based on my limited knowledge this is a fact). So that's one reason why it's easier to jump into really cold water.

Moreover, it yields some evidence to some "mind over body" claims. It isn't really mind over body, it's adrenaline that can be conjured consciously at will. I'm speaking also from personal experience [1].

[1] I've done this at many Dutch dance festivals (e.g. Liquicity, Mysteryland). Instead of taking drugs, I'd do the WHM to spike my adrenaline levels as high as possible and had a great time.

Thanks to the censorship I can only assume OP said something critical towards WHM, which would be in the minority in this thread, but I'll never know.

Which is a bit chilling, pardon the pun.

I'd call it "moderation" rather than "censorship", but if you want to view the "uncensored" version of the site, you can click on your sign-in name in the top-right of the header, and you will be taken to your profile. From there, set "show-dead" to "yes" to be able to view this and other flag-killed comments.

I and many others on the site prefer to view it in this form. If you have show-dead on and some minimum number of HN points (30?) you can "vouch" to revive a killed comment. I thought this particular example would have been better handled with a downvote-of-disagreement rather than a flag, so I vouched for it. I can understand mettamage's reaction, though, and don't blame him for flagging it.

Perhaps a downvote would've been better yea. Thanks for mentioning that.

Edit: unflagged and downvoted. I'll let the original comment stand as I can't edit it anyway.

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