undeather

Its just bad sensemaking. What the fuck. "High sugar diets do not increase inflammatory markers when controlled for calories - therfore, sugar is not pro-inflammatory" Okay, so we are not going to talk about: - mid to long term outcomes due to second order effects like increasing the relative abundance of Proteobacteria in the gut, while simultaneously decreasing the abundance of Bacteroidetes -> which serves as a playing ground for inflammation! - Correlation between high sugar intake and SIBO/IBD prevalence - The worsening of mainly chronic inflammatory conditions during periods of hightened sugar intake - Overclocking PKB/M-TOR through spiking insulin (aging process) - Disadvantagious changes in patterns of DNA methylation and gene expression - Potential impacts on long term HbA1c - Correlation between high sugar diets and mental health outcomes like anxiety & depression - Interindividual differences in the ability to process short chain carbohydrates - the chosen sample of pro-inflammatory markers are highly problematic and reductionistic - we dont eat sugar in its raw form since its usually mixed up in a highly processed piece of garbage with many other ingredients ..... and so on. It's just bro science with a PhD.

Sounds like muscular eye strain to me. However, any philoshophising about what this could be is unfruitful, do the smart thing and visit an ophthamologist asap. Takes 10-15 minutes the check the most important structures and then you know if everythins is alright.

During my medical studies, a highly distinguished professor showed us this video to "teach us" about life. Its sweet, innocent and easy to digest - but I highly doubt that anyone has ever changed his ways because of it. And yes, we cringed too.

You are right. At this point of time, most chronic diseases are deemed "incurable" from a modern medicine standpoint. However, in my estimate - this will change in the next 10-50 years. If you find yourself with such condition at this moment, find a doctor who thinks integrally, acts couragiously, has deep understanding of both evidence based & alternative medicine models (or at least the best one available) and is willing to put in the work. Also, become an expert of your disease. Read everything about it, experiment with yoruself, look what makes your symtpoms worse/better - thats the primary trait I can see in people who are able to reverse their chronic ailments.

Scientifically, this is nonsense of course ....but ..even if its "just" a placebo and not some higher spiritual rite (which is unfalsifiable) - if it works it works. 100% agree with Roy on this

You are 18. With 18 I could eat processed food all day, sleep 4 hours a night and still run a marathon the next day. (not that you should!) Dont overcomplicate eating. Avoiding all the impurities in our food is (as you said) a thing of sheer impossibility. A golden rule that works for most people and will automatically minimize your toxin intake: Eat real food (as unprocessed as possible), mostly plants, grown locally & in season You will be fine. Sounds like a perfect recipe for heart disease and poor cardiovascular health.

Yes

Well, as I said in my first post, very low IQ (which is below 70) is a valid prediction tool for mental retardation. But thats not because the IQ-test itself is specifically designed to measure that - its more a general loss of mental capacity that would show in any other function. At some point, you will reach a point where being mentally challenged will make it impossible to follow easiest intructions or executive directions. However, to draw a simple line where this would happen is impossible because, again -the IQ-measurement sucks, is only marginally correlative and leaves out all the complexity of our reality. I mean, there are algorytims who already kinda do this in (for example) dating apps but I highly doubt that implementing such ideas in the business sector (at a large scale) will have any meaningful benefits. Quiet the contrairy, I think it might put the focus on shitty parameters like IQ & EQ, which could make business outcomes worse. However, this doesnt mean that we cant have better metrics in the future, certainly connected with AI-technology - so iam defintely open to that! I also think that the job market kinda auto-selects the right people for certain job. There is a proposed metric, and I forgot where I read this, that predicts out of the box thinkers with a pretty decent accuracy. One of the qualities those thinkers usually have is the ability to actively seek out alternative viewpoints without getting sucked into them while coming up with some sort of sythesis between them.

The "worth" of a tool is entirely based on it's utilization. IQ is at the bottom an immoral measure that, while not working, can put people (and, worse, groups) in boxes for the rest of their lives. However, that doesnt mean its completely stupid all the time. IQ measures your ability to manage a predefined set of patterns in a finite amount of time. Those patterns obviously correlate, at least to a certain degree in certain fields, with real life problem solving capacities. So sure, if you are looking to hire someone for a Job which requires this sort of processing (i.e theoretical physics for example), then IQ might be one metric to look at. On the other side, I can almost guarantee you that some of the brightest geniuses in our history books did not have a super high IQ. If you actually look at the data, you will find a lot of black-swan cases in almost any correlative category, meaning that there is much more to intelligence in ANY field than just this ambiguous number. The best metric you can use is the one which is required for the specific job. No automation process to date will be able to deal with this kind of complexity. If I had to hire someone I would base my decision on first impression, intuition and a well defined period of observing the learning curve.

Most nihilistacally coated IQ-arguments are based on a basic misunderstanding of what "it" actually is. An IQ-test definitely measures some-"thing" which is seemingly correlated with all sorts of outcomes we deem preferable from a societal standpoint - but if you actually look at the data with some statistical knowledge, you will recognize that its not at all that black & white. There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth. Most “achievements” linked to IQ are measured in circular stuff s.a. bureaucratic or academic success, things for test takers and salary earners in structured jobs that resemble the tests. If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists. As you can see in the graph below, there is little information about IQ/Net-worth if you get rid of the noise and fat tails (probability distributions with relatively high probability of extreme outcomes). There is absolutely no visibible effect over 40k. If IQ-distribution is Gaussian by construction (well, almost) and if real world performance were fat tailed (which they are), then either the covariance between IQ and performance doesn’t exist or it is uninformational. It will show a finite number in sample but doesn’t exist statistically. Intelligence in IQ is determined by academic psychologists via statistical constructs s.a. correlation that they patently don’t understand. It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs) but then any measure would work there. It is a false comparison to claim that IQ “measures the hardware” rather than the software. It can measure some arbitrarily selected mental abilities (in a testing environment) believed to be useful. To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently. And one has to be a lunatic to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking. IQ & Jobs There is this argument that if you fall into a certain subgroup of IQ-distrubution - certain jobs will be off the table. This is again, stupidity at work. Notice the noise: The top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors, even counting the circularity. The circularity bias shows most strikingly with MDs as medical schools require a higher SAT score. Realize that the concept has huge variance, enough to be deemed uninformative. Unlike measurements of height or wealth, which carry a tiny relative error, many people get yuugely different results for the same IQ test (I mean the same person!), up to 2 standard deviations as measured across people, higher than the sampling error in the population itself! This additional source of sampling error weakens the effect by propagation of uncertainty way beyond its predictability when applied to the evaluation of a single individual. It also tells you that you as an individual are vastly more diverse than the crowd, at least with respect to that measure! If, as psychologists show MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools. Most of this was inspired/taken over by Nassim Talebs work about IQ!

1 hour in - actually a really great episode

Yes, its definitely possible to heal (some) autoimmune conditions. Lets assume an autoimmune disease is like a civil war. The approach of conventional medicine would be disarmament (targeted suppression of certain kinds of immune function). The obvious solution however, would be to find out why the conflict started in the first place. This is the regime of complexity medicine. The nature of autoimmunity is that the underlying cause is usually highly individual, multifactorial (many factors come into play) and combinatorial (risk factors combine and create new emergent properties). This is a big problem because the best tools we have to find out "what causes what", namely epidemiological analysis and clinical trials, get exponentially worse to the degree of complexity that is involved in the studied phenomenon. Thats why we are really good at treating acute, monocausal things like bacterial infections or heart attacks - but we kinda suck at finding out why the body of a person with Lupus oder Crohn's disease basically starts killing itself. I got involved in this couple of years ago when I met a guy who reversed his neurodegenerative condition with a complexity approach. He suffered from a pretty nasty case of MS (Multiple sclerosis), which would have destroyed his quality of life & cognitive abilites in a matter of months. His neurologists told him that they basically cant do anything to stop it, that this is his fate and he should learn to deal with it. Long story short - he became an expert in MS, read everything there is to read about it, did some complexitiy medicine testing - supplemented with high doses of certain drugs & vitamins, got rid of the mold exposure in his house and some other toxins - and COMPLETELY reversed his condition. There are a lot of cases like these. Now, that said, - there are a lot of charlatans working in this field. So if you suffer from an autoimmune condition, be careful. Go out there and look for alternative approaches, but dont be naive about it. There are some doctors who specialize in complexity medicine (like me), but we are extremely rare. If you can find one who is willing to work with you, then this is like a golden ticket. Also, lets not badmouth the mainstream approach. Immune-modulating therapies can be a life saver and such a wonderful tool for some patients. If you come to me with an accute Crohn's disease-episode and you have been basically shitting blood for the last 5 days, everything hurts and your life is pure hell - trust me, you want that Cortisone-shot.

Some people really profit from microneedling + topical minoxidil for beard growth. Look into it.

Around 8 - 12 weeks. Johanneskraut seems to work in some patients but the effect is in my experience non optimal. Exactly, never mix up psychodelics with SSRI's or other psychiatric drugs. I am all for the use of psychodelics in battleing depression, but do it safely! The elimination half-life of escitalopram is about 27-33 hours. The reason why you need to go slow/taper it is the so called rebound effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect

Please provide evidence for such outrageous claims. Thank you

Most antidepressants start to take effect after about 2 weeks. Sometimes it can take up to 8 weeks to get to their full spectrum. Regarding the tapering, it depends on the physcian doing it and the drug used. Escitalopram usually comes with a 5mg reduction every 2-4 weeks. Some physicians will go faster than that. Dont stop yet. Give it time and then decide again. Have patience!

I have prescribed SSRI'S and other antidepressants hundreds of times. In some patients they worked miracolously, literally life changing, Others dont feel a lasting effect or face the pretty common side effects. I have never seen lasting damage from them. You just gotta try it - there is no other way to find out. If you face any negative effects, just stop the medication. Its definitely better than suffering all day.

Interesting! I went the complete opposite way. 28 year old, male - basically full body hair. Back, chest, stomach covered with a pretty dense, black coat. Used to be pretty insecure about it as a teenager, shaved a lot, which ended up with my skin being irritated for days. In my early 20s I decided to get rid of it once and for all. Payed some pretty good money to laser my complete torso. One of the bets decisions I made in my life. I personally enjoy the the aesthetics of it much more. + No more hairy bedclothes + less smell after workouts Completely support your decision though. Do what makes you happy

Patient history means chronologically gathering information about your symptoms and factors that might contribute to them. Thats the first and most important stage in any healing process with a health professional. You are always in charge of your own sovereignty but you also need to know your personal limitations. A good doctor will take your perferred direction into account - but at the same time, he is the professional and knows much more about medicine than you do. This can be quite difficult in certain situations because sometimes my patients come to me with demands that might harm them in the long run. Doctors are like any other profession: There are excellent ones and some bad apples.

You dont just order tests like that. A good doctor will take a considerable amount of his time to evaluate your patient history. Complex gastrointestinal issues are usually caused by a multivariate set of interdependent causes. Thats why the first step is incredibly important. Yes, your issues could also be "imagined" (like you asked in your other thread), thats called somatisation/hypochondriasis and is very common these kinds of symtoms. Contact a local provider and find one that feels competent to you.

I have seen more fragile and shadow-veiled ego's in online spiritual communties than in most other ones.

HAH! I didnt know that one. Great video. Absolutely love it. Kinda enjoyed that one too:

Holy moly, those are some pretty disturbing responses. I get the whole neo-advaita thing and also respect Nahm's willingness to embody the teaching, but this is just too far off the deep end. Truth or not, imagine being unable to respond to criticism in a "human" way, while always digressing into obscure wordplays and spiritual etymology. This is not a healthy way to live, nor do I see this kind of behaviour in any othjer neo-advaita teacher. I can not imagine a Rupert Spira or Adyashanti reacting like that. Anyway, this is not to bash Nahm in any way or form - this dude clearly acts out of love and his perspective of truth. Undoubtably a good faith actor with a big heart, but maybe not the right person for moderating the actualized.org community.

I can almost guarantee you that none of that will happen. Thats just not how ethics committees work. Those instituations get hundreds of complaints every week and you really need to do some really crazy stuff before they get enganged.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Regarding citing studies, Dr. K is doomed if he does and damned if he doesnt. As Car-Richard pointed out correctly, most of the data regarding Ayurveda is underpowered, hypothetical or simply not there. However, there is a way to understand alternative medicine in a more integral way, but this is a thing almost unreasonable to expect from his viewerbase/critics. I mean, complex/integral medicine is my daily bread and it took me years to really grasp these concepts in a signifacnt way. I kinda anticipated that this was going to happen because this event is a good example of stage yellow vs stage orange dynamics.