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Comment by bloqs | Hacker News Reader

Immunocompromisation due to chronic inflammation from dietary issues and stress in addition to the above as well

The frequently cited "stress" thing of modern lives is just eyebrows-raising. Do anyone actually believe that lives of people 100 or 200 years ago have been less stressful?

It's possible they had better support systems due to larger families, church being more prominent, etc.

Any form of positive community is helpful, religous or not. Just having caring neighbors is a boon to well-being.

I think the idea is that the cells are stressed due to inflammation due to diet, rather than psychological feelings of stress

Average "healthy" body temperature is down more than half degree exactly because of reduction in inflammation. People used to have very unsanitary lives and were fighting infections nonstop. 37.0C was the "normal" body temperature when the "norm" was first discovered in the early XIX century, now it's considered to be a sickness already.

I'm not an expert but maybe keeping the immuno-army busy with constant infections keeps it from going bored and attacking itself

also not-an-expert opinion, but an average higher body temperature would reduce immune system workload by virtue of killing a lot of stuff dead via inhospitable environment before an immune reaction could ever muster..

Fascinating claim, where did you hear this?

https://iiif.elifesciences.org/lax/49555%2Felife-49555-fig1-...

Work is not the same as stress. People today (especially near the bottom of the ladder) are not in control of their own destiny like they used to be. It's a different kind of stress.

Slaves were more on control of their own destinys than someone working an entry job today?

I was thinking more about farmers.

And they used to be more in control? Epidemics wiping out whole families? Gulags, concentration camps? Religious violence? Persistent threat of starvation death that was just the norm of life? One year of crop failures, and your kids are dead. Two years, and you are dead yourself. And it doesn't depend on you at all, just bad luck (if there was too much luck - like a generation without crop failures - population doubled, then just one year of crop failures meant you were dead). And yeah, the Church that keeps telling people that they were all sinners and will burn in hell, very comforting. Tell me about "control of one's own destiny".

I think there’s something to this. Life in those times was difficult and stressful, yes, but most hardships then were entirely beyond any individual’s control. To a large extent, good times and bad times would come and go regardless of what you did.

Contrast this to the modern day where more often than not, hardships are attributed to personal failings (“You should’ve worked harder if you didn’t want to be stuck working abusive under-compensated jobs!”) and people perpetually teeter on the edge of a knife suspended over a bottomless pit. If anything goes wrong, it’s treated as nobody’s fault but your own, regardless of the reality of the situation. It’s almost a type of psychological torture.

Physical activity gives an outlet to stress, and people used to get way more of it. Stress and physical effort are supposed to go hand-in-hand; you feel stressed, which gives you a boost of adrenaline, which you need to physically fight back whatever caused the stress. When the physical component is missing, the stress just lingers and wreaks havoc on your body.

Also, sunlight exposure (with limited UV) went hand in hand. Now we have neither.

Careful. Exercise also causes a stress response in-and-of itself.

well, you may read & discuss this one? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions_...

Have you read Dr. Casey Means’ book on this?

Literally every time in the history of the universe when someone has structured a sentence like this, in this context, whoever they're talking about ends up being a giant crackpot. I'm not saying this person is a crackpot, just that the pattern recognition systems are throwing off some alarms.

First sentence from wikipedia says:

Casey Means is an American functional medicine/holistic medicine physician, entrepreneur and author.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Means

I'm more influenced by this passage:

Means withdrew from her medical residency at age 30. She has attributed this decision to the lack of training she received about nutrition and the underlying causes of chronic disease. Means dedicated her practice to functional medicine, which focuses on the root causes of disease.

As one comedian said: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine!”

that's cute but how much alternative medicine eventually finds a way into real medicine?

in other words : someone telling someone to practice yoga to relax and reduce their heart rate 200 years ago was a quack right up until the point that modern doctors decided to include it in their repertoire?

it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline, even if a lot of it turns out badly.

The actual quote (from memory, but I just listened to the monologue a minute ago): "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been scientifically proven to work? Medicine!"

In other words, the quote is exactly referring to your "pipeline."

Tim Minchin's "Storm" monologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk

Medicine as a science didn't exist 200 years ago.

Breath exercises, and physical therapy for relaxation were mainstream in 1960-s.

> it's a cute joke but it skips over the fact that there seems to be an 'alternative medicine -> real medicine' pipeline

Not really. Most of the non-medicine (I refuse to call it "alternative") stays non-medicine: acupuncture, homeopathy, all the "energy meridians" nonsense, ayurveda, alkaline foods, etc.

And even with activities like yoga, it's not more effective than other types of similar physical activity. There is some very weak evidence that yoga _with_ physiotherapy might be more effective than just increased levels of physiotherapy.

Tim Minchin! (about 4 minutes in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtYkyB35zkk

Well that red flag versus the immediately-preceding passage listing a Doctor of Medicine degree at Stanford Medical School.

I looked into one of the links and apparently she pushes fairly mainstream preventive medicine stuff, diet, exercise, and screening tests. The only questionable thing I saw was the continuous glucose monitoring thing which the jury may still be out on when it comes to non-diabetics.

I haven't tried a continuous glucose monitor myself but those non-diabetics who have generally claim that it gave them interesting insights into how their blood glucose level reacted to different foodstuffs and timing of meals. There is a lot of individual variation there due to genetics, lifestyle, gut microbiome, etc. We'll probably never see a large-scale, long-term randomized controlled trial to show that CGM use improves health outcomes for non-diabetics. But for healthy people who already have the basics dialed in, a CGM can probably help them eke out some additional marginal gains.

If you end up dealing with a chronic disease that medical doctors completely fail in dealing with, you naturally get driven to look at “alternatives”. There’s a lot of nonsense out there - but some of it works. As a former skeptic I’m now much less dismissive of these things due to my own circumstances. Particularly when I can see that poor medical treatment over the years actually exacerbated my condition and being less skeptical could have improved my quality of life significantly sooner.

Now that you mention that pattern, I can’t say I disagree with your comment. However, the information I can find about Means seems to be fairly…non-controversial. Or at least I don’t understand the controversy (which is very likely).

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