Epistemology of a Doctor

[integral]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

SCN is entrained by not just light exposure but also other factors like meal times, physical activity, environmental cues like laying in bed and closing your eyes, hormone fluctuations, ambient temperature fluctuations, social interactions, and general arousal.

Are you trying to do a “ gotcha” moment by revealing that I don’t know the most basic thing every YouTuber rambles on about in every single sleep video for the past 20 years? Lmaooo

When Brian Johnson revealed his sleep protocol, it was something I seen 1000 times before. Morning red light exposure, avoiding blue light exposure at night, eating at a specific point in time, avoiding digestive stress by creating two hours of space before bedtime sleep, hydration levels, avoiding stressed throughout the day, which directly affects every Sleep Cycle, And everything possible else that he is doing. I’ve been doing all of this since the beginning 15 years before him. I am the original Brian Johnson, bow to me 😂

I didn’t know I had to point out a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work to fix serious sleep problems to convince you guys that I have knowledge?

Optimizing sleep is not how you fix sleeping disorders,  it in fact does the opposite and works against you most of the time. And your doctor has no concept of this. The first thing they go on about when you interact with them is they try to teach you these different things that could cause sleeping problems. It is ridiculous because That never helps anyone. And in the end they give you a drug and then for most people that drug is all they need and it gets them on a permanent dependency. (but it works)

People that have chronic insomnia they cannot solve the problem through sleep hygiene. That is not an effective treatment method, and it rarely works in practice, because you’re burdening them with a very strict complicated routine, that  is not address any actual health problem inside their body, which is causing the sleeping problem.

The doctor will ask you are you playing intense video games? Things along those lines…. And this is somehow supposed to be holistic. This might work for some cases because people are just stressed and they can’t sleep and for the average random human, they could experience sleeping problems for about two weeks and then it just disappears randomly.

I know the sleep effects eating an apple does to you while you sleep versus eating a steak versus eating an orange, because they’re all completely different sleep experiences that I tested. Versus every other food combination. Versus every exercise routine during any part of the day, versus hundreds of different scented products.. I have experiment with thousands and become conscious of thousands of sleep experiences by constructing thousands of different routines.

I slept in a tent in the woods for a month to see if I could get the clean as possible Air maybe the city air was causing problems? I don’t know, time to experiment…

I used every brain cell available to explore every possibility for a decade. And comparing me to a sleep doctor that has never had a sleeping problem…. It’s ridiculous. I am so far ahead of them It’s not a competition.

It’s like comparing a financial advisor fresh out of school with Elon Musk.

What magical knowledge do you think sleep specialist have that is not available to someone who put the effort, who is self-taught and whose life was on the line?

Edited May 4 by integral

[integral]

49 minutes ago, Aaron p said:

Long story short I urged him to consult his doctor and firmly tell them that we think it's something to do with his medication. Turns out the doctor had him on some kind of drug that was making him extremely stupid and causing the falls. He stopped taking it and increased the dose of a different drug. I think I probably extended my grandfather's Life by about 15 years. 

When you scale this up, most people don’t have a family member that can see the issues a drug causes the way you did and intervene. So at scale there’s so much destruction happening.

Doctors make mistakes constantly that hurt patience and most of the time the patient never figures it out, your grandfather would’ve taught that he was just getting old and nothing else. And everyone else taught the same thing.

I consume thousands of perspectives exactly like this where a person’s health is just destroyed by healthcare intervention and the patient never connects the drug to their decline because they associat it some other problem like, “ I have bad genetics”, “ I’m just getting old”…

The doctor doesn’t understand their causing harm and the patient doesn’t understand they’re being harmed. And the only people that understand this is happening are does that directly seen it happen with their own eyes like you did.

Edited May 4 by integral

[integral]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

What kind of fucking evil doctors are you visiting? 😂

Most doctors are sensors not intuitives

And if they’re the legendary ESTP (I know MBTI is illegal)  there’s some of the most prideful status oriented people that you can find. They thrive on the nectar of praise.

[integral]

Most people become doctors because they’re status oriented, they want to be respected by society, and they want to make a lot of money.

It is the pursuit of achievement.

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, integral said:

Are you trying to do a “ gotcha” moment by revealing that I don’t know the most basic thing every YouTuber rambles on about in every single sleep video for the past 20 years? Lmaooo

I mainly tried to trap you into conceding that doctors are more holistic than you make them out to be, but you instead only wrote what was the first two sentences on the Wikipedia, so I had to spoon-feed it to you.

 

2 hours ago, integral said:

The first thing they go on about when you interact with them is they try to teach you these different things that could cause sleeping problems. It is ridiculous because That never helps anyone.

You talk in these obviously exaggerated terms that are obviously not true. Why?

 

2 hours ago, integral said:

People that have chronic insomnia they cannot solve the problem through sleep hygiene. That is not an effective treatment method, and it rarely works in practice, because you’re burdening them with a very strict complicated routine, that  is not address any actual health problem inside their body, which is causing the sleeping problem.

Every doctor knows sleep disturbances are often comorbid with other illnesses and general poor health. You don't have to be a renegade holistic health scientist to know that. When they teach you sleep hygiene, that's again because it's one of the most obvious thing to start with. And again, because treatment is a recursive process, if that doesn't work, they move over to the next thing.

 

2 hours ago, integral said:

What magical knowledge do you think sleep specialist have that is not available to someone who put the effort, who is self-taught and whose life was on the line?

Knowledge about problems that you personally haven't had. You don't become on expert on sleep problems by fixing your own. You become an expert (if that) on your own sleeping problems.

Edited May 4 by Carl-Richard

[integral]

5 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I mainly tried to trap you into conceding that doctors are more holistic than you make them out to be, but you instead only wrote what was the first two sentences on the Wikipedia, so I had to spoon-feed it to you.

 

You talk in these obviously exaggerated terms that are obviously not true. Why?

A sleep specialist does not use holistic thinking to solve a problem. Within 10 minutes there telling you to take a drug. If you keep on going back to their office, they’ll eventually get frustrated and tell you to stop. They’re not in a thinking problem-solving state

Every doctor knows sleep disturbances are often comorbid with other illnesses and general poor health. You don't have to be a renegade holistic health scientist to know that. When they teach you sleep hygiene, that's again because it's one of the most obvious thing to start with. And again, because treatment is a recursive process, if that doesn't work, they move over to the next thing.

No, in practice, they do very little recursive anything, their idea of exploration is just to try out different drugs, at no point are they gonna cure your restless leg syndrome, the solution is more drugs, all paradigm lock there’s nothing holistic about it. They’re not discovering the root cause of your disease if you’re not looking for the root cause you’re not holistic. If you’re managing symptoms and that’s 99% of your job, you’re not doing anything holistic.

Knowledge about problems that you personally haven't had. You don't become on expert on sleep problems by fixing your own. You become an expert (if that) on your own sleeping problems.

Wrong I learned how to do holistic problem-solving they have not, I have expanded my understanding to consider things far beyond their ability that caused sleep, disturbances, and sleeping problems. 

Traditional medicine is often like patching a leaking boat with duct tape, quick fixes to keep it afloat. But holistic problem-solving is more like diving beneath the surface, finding the crack in the hull, and asking why the pressure built up in the first place.

I solved my cousins restless leg syndrome, just with straight intuition from everything I’ve learned. So he experimented with my recommendation and it stopped. I didn’t even need to go down the rabbit hole of trial and error.

A doctor has zero ability to understand the root causes of any diseases, they’re not trained for that

The flow chart a doctor memorizes for restless leg syndrome involves first testing to see if the claim is true and then giving a drug, there is no solution outside of that. They are taught that it is a permanent illness. If a person is thought, something is permanent, and there is no cure they will not look deeper than that and certainly cannot connect all variables together to solve the problem.

They won’t even look at all of the scientific data on the topic and just start throwing it at you and try all the things available, they won’t even do the bare minimum of regurgitating their own science. They repeat whatever generic thing they learned in school

People are better off using ChatGPT because at least the AI will just brute  force and tell you everything science has ever figured out about the topic. Doctor just won’t tell you. Even then the treatments ChatGPT will give you are surface level, it tries to solve the problem directly (massages) and not indirectly (allergies). Which perfectly reflects the unholistic nature of the industry. It would never tell you the solution to restless leg syndrome. Because the industry cannot think about the root causes, they’re thinking top down, not the bottom up

do you think a sleep specialist is going to check for nutrition deficiency? NEVERrrrrr

Edited May 4 by integral

[zurew]

@integral

Most of your problems that you listed can be explained by other things. So for example, when it comes to your phrasing of "dismissing your lived experience" - there is a difference between you reporting your experience vs you coming up with your own hypothesis and strongly insisting on that you are right. In once case, you report facts in the other you give an explanation of the facts.

You have strongly insisted multiple times that you are an expert and that you have some special epistemology, but from what you wrote that doesn't seem to be the case. Anyone can use the try-fail approach in a mindless way it doesn't take any intelligence to randomly pick and tweak things - what actually does take intelligence is the ability to pick the right things and to tweak them the right amount so that the problem is solved. "But I solved my own problem" - lets grant that , but what was the justification to pick that particular thing over picking any other random thing ? It was done in a completely random way and it was based on pure luck. "I have a 100 things that I will go over" Why did you pick those 100 things though over any other thing? "Well it was just random".

Also what makes you think that you solved the root issue and you didnt just treat the symptoms?

 

 

You have talked about doctors lacking rigor and granularity - you want rigor ,but you cant answer basic questions like "what makes you think that your hypothesis yielded your results and not something else that you didn't track/measured?" 

Appealing to the try and fail approach isnt sufficient , because of many things one of which is time delay - lets say you tried 50 different things and after trying the 50th thing your sleep quality improved. How do you know that the 50th thing generated the outcome and not the 1st thing with a longer time delay? You have 0 clue, but again, you have 100% confidence that you are right on this, even though you cant provide any reasoning that would justify your confidence in choosing your hypothesis over any other. 

So even assuming that you were responsbile for generating the outcome and not something else that you didnt track and was outside of your control - even under that frame there is so many possibilities and so much nuance that you utterly fail to grasp and capture in your "explanation". You need more epistemic norms that can constrain the scope and help with differentiating between all the different hypothesis that are all under your fail-try possibility set. If you tried 50 different things then you have 50! (factorial) number of combinations of hypothesis that you can choose from (the first one generated the result or the second one or both the second and first or just the 50th one or all the 50 were responsible for it  etc).

 

 

 

Edited May 4 by zurew

[zurew]

11 hours ago, integral said:

My sleep quality drastically improved. Returning to the house immediately re-triggered the same severe sleep problems. The only real variable was air quality—a detail virtually no doctor had considered important.

How is that the only "real" variable in the circumstance? 

There are so many other possibilities there, its just that your intuition randomly came up with "air quality" as an answer and you took at as if that would be the only possibility there.

[integral]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

50 different things and after trying the 50th thing your sleep quality improved. How do you know that the 50th thing generated the outcome and not the 1st thing with a longer time delay?

Everything was done in isolation. One thing at a time over months and then I switched to something else and it’s true that some things need longer time delay, but it’s rare. Most things show immediate symptom relief, but not completely eliminating the problem like if you have coeliac disease and completely stop eating gluten 85% of your problem will disappear, but that doesn’t mean that you solved anything, it just gives you a clue that you use later on.

but in general, what you’re saying, doesn’t apply properly in practice, you cannot take tests and then solve these hard problems. Unless you Brian Johnson with $2 million in testing equipment.

If you go on YouTube and look at anyone who solved their own health problems. It’s all through trial and error.

I wrote that I did hundreds of different tests that I researched firsthand, then went to a doctor and convinced him to take the test.  And they were all largely symptom related and so gave me no clue on what was causing it. For example, my thyroid hormone became low for a period of time and then I went back to normal randomly when I took the test again.  And my mercury levels changed and certain nutrition factors changed, but then they fluctuate back to normal.

In practice when a doctor test that your thyroid hormone is low, they think you have a permanent thyroid problem and cannot see the systemic problem that is causing it.  They cannot see the indirect problem that is causing your thyroid hormone to be low so what do they do? They give you thyroid pills which exasperates  the problem.  All of this testing is used unintelligently to manage symptoms, they confuse symptoms for the actual disease and cannot see root cause of root problems.

After I solve my issue,  my thyroid went back to normal and so did other testing markers,  which all of them told some doctor that I needed spot treatment,  which of course would’ve kept me sick my whole life

2 hours ago, zurew said:

How is that the only "real" variable in the circumstance? 

There are so many other possibilities there, its just that your intuition randomly came up with "air quality" as an answer and you took at as if that would be the only possibility there.

Two separate locations one gives acute symptoms one does not. In both cases I’m consuming Air in different location, it’s fairly concrete. So I removed everything that was putting chemicals or mould in the air and my symptoms went away.

I also took articles of clothes I suspected I could be allergic to brought them to the tent and then just inhaled it while I slept to see if that triggered all the same symptoms and it did.

What other possible changes were there?

You’re talking like there’s this rigourous scientific testing protocol i could’ve done that would’ve determined my problem and solved it and it’s not true. No one is giving you those tests in practice, no one has any idea how to narrow down stuff using tests in practice. They stop at superficial things they see on the test. If magnesium is low or if iron is low, they’re not solving the cause they’re just giving you supplements. And it doesn’t work long-term. The cause gets worse and worse and worse because the roots problem that is causing your iron deficiency is never solved.

Edited May 4 by integral

[integral]

@zurew Your standards are appropriate in a lab scenario not on the field in practice.

You're applying a standard of proof to my personal experience that no one applies in real life, not even doctors. You're basically asking for a lab report. You want complete variable isolation, control groups, elimination of confounding factors, causal attribution, and statistical validation. That’s completely unrealistic. It's the kind of thing that even formal research struggles to achieve, and you're asking one individual, outside of any institutional support, to hit that mark just to justify a personal conclusion that works.

There's a difference between randomness and guided experimentation. What I did wasn't just mindless trial and error. I used logic, pattern recognition, and actual feedback from my body to form working hypotheses. Then I refined those hypotheses over time. If my sleep quality drastically improved when I left a specific environment, and then tanked immediately when I returned, and that pattern repeated more than once, it's not “random” to suspect air quality. It's a rational inference. That doesn't mean it's proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, it means it's the most useful and consistent explanation I've found. And it’s more than any doctor ever offered me.

You keep asking, "How do you know it wasn’t something else?" But the better question is, why did every professional I saw ignore the possibility entirely? If someone outside the system identifies something that consistently changes their health, and it’s something all the experts missed, the takeaway isn't "you got lucky." The takeaway is "they missed something." That's not arrogance, that's paying attention.

Also, let’s be honest. Doctors themselves don't use the kind of rigor you're demanding from me. They prescribe treatments based on symptom clusters and averages, not deep mechanistic understanding. They manage patterns, just like I did. When I do it, it's "unscientific." When they do it, it's "evidence-based." The double standard is absurd.

You're asking for 50 factorial-level epistemic parsing, as if I have to prove exactly which combination of variables solved my problem. That’s intellectual paralysis disguised as rigor. In real life, people use feedback loops, not factorial analysis. If something changes, and you reintroduce the suspected cause and the problem comes back, that’s not random. That’s meaningful.

You want me to be 100 percent sure of a causal chain before I say anything. But that’s not how humans or medicine work. You don’t need to chart the exact path of every raindrop in a storm to know that it rained. And I don’t need to submit a lab report to know I was getting better, and why.

You're demanding a lab report.

[zurew]

1 hour ago, integral said:

You're demanding a lab report.

Nope, what I am asking for is beyond science, you cant solve this level of disagreement with just an experiment - we are talking about philosophy of science (that I assumed people here gave a fuck about, especially people who wants to criticize the scientific community).

What we are talking more specifically is  justification and establishing different epistemic norms to judge things by.

Without establishing what kind of norms are reasonable to judge things by in this context, we end up in this fucking mess where its unclear what kind of metanorms your are using to establish that your approach is better than for instance the scientific community's approach. 

Without clarifying this, my random norm of 'if I count 100 insects on the street that will mean yes' will have no less weight than you asking your girlfriend whether she wants to be your wife , and she says yes.

What kind of metanorms can you appeal to, to showcase that you asking your girlfriend makes much more sense to gain information about her mental state than me counting insects on the street? Or should I combine the two norms to be more holistic and give some weight to the insect one?

 

WIthout you answering that question, we can apply the same thing to hypothesis - what does it mean to have a better hypothesis? What kind of variables do you check to differentiate between multiple hypothesis? Without having a clear idea about that , you will appeal to vague words and random norms and you saying buzzwords like holistic and it will sound profound to some people here ,but it very quickly falls apart, because you havent thought about it deeply enough.

And this is just one issue, the other issue is your unsubstantiated claims when you paint with a broad brush the whole scientific community based on your personal experience.

 

Btw do you know whats one answer to the parsing question? You can narrow down the set by appealing to studies and evidence within those studies to strengthen parts of your hypothesis, but that would be an issue for you, because earlier you had a long session about doctors being memorizing and appeal to authority monkeys.

You can also appeal to scientific knowledge without needing to reinvent the wheel from scratch - but again that will go against your requirement where doctors need to question everything and independently need to verify everything.

Another way to narrow down the set is by repeating the same approach over and over again under different circumstances and with different time delays with different people and trying it on a lot of people (you know conducting studies that you dismissed, because thats biased)

 

Me asking you and giving you the opportunity  to map out your epistemology where you can showcase your norms and show us why your approach is actually better and explain to us unconscious normies what we are missing  is unfair (after you making yourself an authority on this topic by claiming to be the best on earth) and I am asking for too much, but you demanding doctors to play 20 different roles, and to be experts in 20 different fields and to know philosophy of science and to run experiments and to also do research and to also treat patients  is realistic and a fair standard.

 

Edited May 4 by zurew

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, integral said:

People are better off using ChatGPT because at least the AI will just brute  force and tell you everything science has ever figured out about the topic.

Ok, let's do that for one of your answers:

Quote

Is this an accurate representation of how doctors work? Provide statistics from actual studies to back up each counterpoint:

"I learned how to do holistic problem-solving they have not, I have expanded my understanding to consider things far beyond their ability that caused sleep, disturbances, and sleeping problems.

Traditional medicine is often like patching a leaking boat with duct tape, quick fixes to keep it afloat. But holistic problem-solving is more like diving beneath the surface, finding the crack in the hull, and asking why the pressure built up in the first place.

I solved my cousins restless leg syndrome, just with straight intuition from everything I’ve learned. So he experimented with my recommendation and it stopped. I didn’t even need to go down the rabbit hole of trial and error.

A doctor has zero ability to understand the root causes of any diseases, they’re not trained for that

The flow chart a doctor memorizes for restless leg syndrome involves first testing to see if the claim is true and then giving a drug, there is no solution outside of that. They are taught that it is a permanent illness. If a person is thought, something is permanent, and there is no cure they will not look deeper than that and certainly cannot connect all variables together to solve the problem.

They won’t even look at all of the scientific data on the topic and just start throwing it at you and try all the things available, they won’t even do the bare minimum of regurgitating their own science. They repeat whatever generic thing they learned in school"

Quote

Below I break the original text into six main claims, give a brief verdict on each one, and—most importantly—attach data from peer-reviewed studies or authoritative guidelines that speak directly to the point. Citations follow the required format.

1. “I learned how to do holistic problem-solving; doctors have not.”

What the evidence says

Indicator of “holistic” trainingRecent findings

Core medical-school content on Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)The Liaison Committee on Medical Education noted that 87 U.S. schools required SDOH content in 2018-2019 — already more than half of all accredited programs (PMC)

Dedicated clinical-reasoning curricula (teaches systematic root-cause thinking)A 2020 study found 68 % of U.S. medical schools explicitly use a clinical-reasoning framework to teach the physical exam (PMC)

Post-graduate (residency) SDOH exposureAmong 279 U.S. family-medicine residency directors, 41 % reported substantial formal SDOH training, and 93.9 % agreed that screening for social needs “should be standard of care.” (PMC)

Take-away: While the depth varies by school, the majority of U.S. physicians are now trained to consider biologic and social root causes, not just “patch symptoms.”

2. “Traditional medicine is just duct-tape; it never looks for root causes.”

Reality check

Preventive & lifestyle counseling – the quintessential “root-cause” work – is far from perfect, but it is routine*:

Nutrition counseling occurs in 25 – 40 % of primary-care visits (PMC).

For hypertension, one multi-center analysis of 1.5 million office visits found guideline-documented lifestyle counseling in 22 – 34 % of cases, with nurse-managed clinics reaching 33.5 % vs 22.5 % in usual care (PMC, PMC).

These numbers show plenty of room to improve, but they also contradict the notion of “zero” root-cause work.

3. “A doctor has zero ability to understand the root causes of any disease; they’re not trained for that.”

Medical training in pathophysiology and diagnostic reasoning is both intensive and measurable.

The median U.S. curriculum still contains ~160 contact-hours of pathology/pathophysiology over the pre-clinical years (range 40 – 450 h) (PMC).

Adding a six-hour reasoning module in one school significantly increased students’ ability to select pathophysiologically relevant symptoms (p < 0.01) (PMC).

That is the opposite of “zero” capacity for root-cause thinking.

4. “For restless legs syndrome (RLS) the doctor’s flow-chart is: confirm it’s real, then give a drug; they’re taught it’s permanent and incurable.”

Current guideline algorithm (2025 AASM)

Measure ferritin + transferrin saturation in all clinically significant RLS cases (Good-practice statement #1) (PubMed).

First-line: correct iron deficiency (oral or IV) if ferritin ≤ 75 ng/mL or TSAT < 20 %.

Address aggravating factors (caffeine, certain drugs, untreated sleep apnoea) before prescribing symptom-driven agents.

Pharmacotherapy (gabapentinoids, dopamine agonists, etc.) only after the above.

In other words, the standard pathway starts with reversible biological causes and lifestyle contributors; RLS is very much considered treatable.

5. “I fixed my cousin’s RLS intuitively; doctors couldn’t.”

Iron replacement—precisely what many lay “intuitive” cures amount to—has long been evidence-based:

Randomised trials: Meta-analysis of 10 RCTs shows iron therapy increases the likelihood of meaningful symptom improvement by a risk ratio of 2.16 compared with placebo (PubMed).

Open-label IV iron: In 2019, repeated ferric carboxymaltose achieved an 80 % response rate among prior responders (PMC).

So a physician following guidelines would have recommended essentially the same intervention—only with lab confirmation to avoid unnecessary or unsafe iron dosing.

6. “Doctors don’t even look at their own science; they just parrot school notes.”

The very existence of frequently updated, evidence-graded guidelines belies that claim:

GuidelineYearReferencesEvidence method

American Academy of Sleep Medicine RLS CPG202567 primary referencesSystematic review + GRADE rating (PubMed)

International RLS Study Group iron-treatment guideline201826 referencesEvidence-based & consensus mix (PubMed)

Regular updates (2012 → 2016 → 2018 → 2025) show constant re-examination of the data—not blind repetition.

Bottom line

Inaccurate to say physicians “have zero ability” or never pursue root causes.

Partly accurate that lifestyle counseling is under-delivered (one-third of visits), but that reflects systemic constraints, not lack of training.

Wrong that RLS is approached as “permanent” or drug-only; iron status and other modifiable factors come first by guideline.

Put simply: modern physicians may not be perfect, but the training and the evidence base they use are geared toward exactly the kind of holistic, root-cause thinking the quotation dismisses.

ChatGPT-o3 with internet sources: https://chatgpt.com/share/68178e30-ead4-8004-8d99-a1a32e59cb3d

Edited May 4 by Carl-Richard

[integral]

@Carl-Richard

Quote

Integral Quoting myself: ->> If there’s 100 different research papers with unique reasons causing a sleeping problem. Your doctor will use none of them to diagnose you… they don’t even know it exists because they didn’t learn that in school.

You just listed a bunch of surface level symptoms that are not the root cause and do not solve the issue. The definition of root cause clearly O3 doesn't understand because it's reflecting the scientific Community which doesn't understand root cause.

Most diagnosis are surface level. The naming of the disease is a surface level problem not the root problem that caused the disease.

Some guys immune system is going crazy causing thyroid hormone problems what's the root cause? The diagnosis is Hashimoto's which is not a root cause. They don't know what the root cause is, they only understand the symptom which they're labeling as Hashimoto's.

So if all of these labels are already wrong and they're doing science to solve the these superficial symptoms, they're already completely off.

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Nope, what I am asking for is beyond science, you cant solve this level of disagreement with just an experiment - we are talking about philosophy of science (that I assumed people here gave a fuck about, especially people who wants to criticize the scientific community).

What we are talking more specifically is  justification and establishing different epistemic norms to judge things by.

I completely agreed exactly what I want to talk about. Up to this point you've been pushing empiricism onto me?

Without establishing what kind of norms are reasonable to judge things by in this context, we end up in this fucking mess where its unclear what kind of metanorms your are using to establish that your approach is better than for instance the scientific community's approach. 

Without clarifying this, my random norm of 'if I count 100 insects on the street that will mean yes' will have no less weight than you asking your girlfriend whether she wants to be your wife , and she says yes.

What kind of metanorms can you appeal to, to showcase that you asking your girlfriend makes much more sense to gain information about her mental state than me counting insects on the street? Or should I combine the two norms to be more holistic and give some weight to the insect one?

Those are completely different problems that you're trying to solve which require different epistemic tools.

WIthout you answering that question, we can apply the same thing to hypothesis - what does it mean to have a better hypothesis? What kind of variables do you check to differentiate between multiple hypothesis? Without having a clear idea about that , you will appeal to vague words and random norms and you saying buzzwords like holistic and it will sound profound to some people here ,but it very quickly falls apart, because you havent thought about it deeply enough.

And this is just one issue, the other issue is your unsubstantiated claims when you paint with a broad brush the whole scientific community based on your personal experience.

 

Btw do you know whats one answer to the parsing question? You can narrow down the set by appealing to studies and evidence within those studies to strengthen parts of your hypothesis, but that would be an issue for you, because earlier you had a long session about doctors being memorizing and appeal to authority monkeys.

I completely agree, and I've done hundreds of tests by researching online and then going to the office and running all those tests with a doctor and to use information I learned from research to help narrow things down.

It's one important epistemic part of the epistemic whole.

I'm not dismissing all of science I'm simply pointing to the limitations of a doctor's epistemic profile which is blinded to Parts of epistimology With no meta epistemic awareness and to say they're biased to data orientation and they're not capable of anything else.

You can also appeal to scientific knowledge without needing to reinvent the wheel from scratch - but again that will go against your requirement where doctors need to question everything and independently need to verify everything.

Another way to narrow down the set is by repeating the same approach over and over again under different circumstances and with different time delays with different people and trying it on a lot of people (you know conducting studies that you dismissed, because thats biased)

At no point am i saying all studies are worthless, Im saying the real world does not fit the map and separately the map is corrupt, and because you could see the map doesn't mean you're doing it properly in practice which requires strategy that doctors are not using.

Me asking you and giving you the opportunity  to map out your epistemology where you can showcase your norms and show us why your approach is actually better and explain to us unconscious normies what we are missing  is unfair (after you making yourself an authority on this topic by claiming to be the best on earth) and I am asking for too much, but you demanding doctors to play 20 different roles, and to be experts in 20 different fields and to know philosophy of science and to run experiments and to also do research and to also treat patients  is realistic and a fair standard.

Yes a doctor cannot specialize, just like I cannot play chess by seeing half the chessboard. Specializing fails in practice. Just like if you try to solve a chess problem when you could only see half the board you'll never find a solution.

If there are five components to a health problem which is necessary to understand and cure the person then how can you do that if you could only see one part of the five? 

I got tested for celiac disease, which is epistemically the empirical way of knowing, the result was negative, I then went home and I experimented removing gluten from my diet, epistemically the personal experience way of knowing which gathers completely different types of data that aren't just true and false statements. I also did Heavy research on all the things that could interconnect celiac nutrition deficiencies and tried those supplements out which is an epistemic way of Gathering data. I then researched heavily personal experience of other people and their Journeys of healing and mark down their routines hundreds of different types which is a different type of epistemic knowing and data point. And I took all of this and Incorporated it into my own internal model of how to navigate the topic to solve the problem.

I agree and think a holistic epistemic approach is the correct one and the profile I gave at the beginning of this topic is that of a partial epistemic profile that doctors use which largely ignore important aspects of epistemology. That's the whole point of this conversation.

Quote

🧰 Summary of Epistemic Tools Used

Tool / Mode Description

• Empirical Testing (e.g., Celiac Test)Standard scientific, binary-result knowledge
• Personal Experimentation Trial-and-error with lived feedback
• Research-Based Inference Synthesizing literature, theories, mechanistic reasoning
• Testimonial/Narrative Inquiry Learning from other people's health journeys
• Pattern Recognition / Abduction Inferring likely causes from incomplete data
• Phenomenology Detailed tracking of first-person internal states
• Interpersonal Dialogue Testing ideas through debate and discussion
• Somatic / Embodied Knowledge Using the body’s own signals as a guide

All of these ways of knowing are extremely important but doctors are hypervigilantly focused on empirical testing. 

A better way is to use each patient as a test subject to gather data using every epistemic tool available. And then for the doctor to personally have a interest in finding root problems and narrowing things down and then when they find a solution they incorporate that and integrate that into their practice. 

Something as simple as watching 100 YouTube videos on people that cured IBS is far more useful than listening to what a IBS specialist is doing (Which is to give you anti-inflammatory drugs rectally). This is a critical epistemic tool that is completely ignored.

All of these treatments strategies just don't exist in healthcare industry And the primary reason is because it is not profitable. Do you see the epistemic blind spot? Not because they're not scientifically proven But because it's not part of a doctor's paradigm

Edited May 4 by integral

[integral]

@Carl-Richard The list you gave me is this idealist Ivory Tower, How many times do I have to explain it, my cousin walked into the building and received drugs, They are not applying strategy the way you a rational person would do! On top of that the list you gave me isn't the root problem and doesn't solve the problem.

Edited May 4 by integral

[integral]

If there's a hundred people on YouTube that personally cured their own IBS do you see how incredibly foolish it would be for a doctor who has a patient that comes in with IBS to not bother learning anything about the topic besides the bare minimum they learned in school?

How can you sit there as a "problem solver" and have no real curiosity in the subject?

Edited May 4 by integral

[Carl-Richard]

19 minutes ago, integral said:

The list you gave me is this idealist Ivory Tower

Can you go point by point and directly address the statistics?

Edited May 4 by Carl-Richard

[integral]

18 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Can you go point by point and directly address the statistics?

I will, but you’re asking for statistics to debunk statistics from the same source. You’re also asking me to re-interpret all those statistics. To interpret it from a different paradigm

Edited May 4 by integral

[Yimpa]

1 minute ago, integral said:

you’re asking for statistics to debunk statistics from the same source. You’re also asking me to re-interpret all those statistics.

[integral]

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Can you go point by point?

Quote

Absolutely. Here’s a bullet-point list that directly pulls from the tables above without changing any of the original wording, grouped by each of your opponent's six claims:

1. “Doctors learn to think holistically”

Token exposure ≠ systems competence. Workshops are brief, optional, or siloed. A 2023 review found students say SDoH training is “superficial and inadequate.”

They teach differential diagnosis inside the biomedical frame (What disease label fits these signs?)—not causal network mapping across nutrition, environment, toxins, microbiome, circadian disruption, etc. No course time is devoted to those linkages.

Screening is not intervention. 93 % say they should ask about housing or food—but < 20 % have funded pathways to fix the issue. Root causes stay untouched.

2. “Lifestyle counseling is common”

Depth is paper‑thin. Typical nutrition chat lasts < 3 minutes. Meanwhile medical students still average only ~11–20 hours total nutrition training across four years.

Exactly—because the doctor’s time/billing model discourages long exploration. Systemic incentives push toward quick scripts, not upstream repair.

Boxes get ticked, but BP meds are started the same day. Patients rarely receive micronutrient assays, sleep audits, or coaching that would target pathophysiology.

3. “Doctors understand root causes via pathophysiology training”

Hours = memorisation of organ‑level pathways divorced from lived context. Complex‑systems papers note med‑ed still treats the body as linear plumbing, not a nonlinear network.

Exams reward pattern recognition of ICD codes—not tracing why the pattern emerged (e.g., gut permeability → ferritin loss → dopaminergic stress → RLS).

4. “RLS is treated with root-cause protocols”

Functional iron deficiency can exist with ferritin up to 150 ng/mL. Brain iron status doesn’t track serum perfectly; many symptomatic patients are told “labs normal.”

Those are surface modifiers, not upstream generators (e.g., gut malabsorption, chronic inflammation, B‑vitamin or magnesium deficits).

Every step remains symptom‑oriented: raise a lab marker or blunt sensations. No guidance on why the patient is iron‑deficient or inflamed in the first place.

5. “RCTs show iron works—doctors are right”

Great—but ~40 % still don’t respond, relapse is common, and infusion treats a marker, not the origin of depletion (celiac, H pylori, heavy‑metal antagonism, menstrual loss).

And IV iron carries oxidative‑stress risks and doesn’t fix malabsorption or dietary insufficiency—so it’s a patch, not a root fix.

6. “Updated guidelines = evidence-based holistic care”

They still evaluate RCTs on drugs or single supplements—because that’s what gets funded. Virtually no trials on circadian light hygiene, gut repair, toxin load, or multi‑factor protocols make it into PubMed, so guidelines stay inside a pharmacocentric loop.

Rigorous at answering narrow questions (Does drug X lower IRLS score by ≥3 points?). It does not ask, What upstream constellation makes dopamine circuits hypersensitive in the first place?

o3^
All of this is pointless, all you have to do is look at the results these doctors are getting in practice. Obviously as I say that you're not going to get what I'm talking about and you're going to go look for statistics basically of the mafia telling you that the mafia is great. You have to use Epistemic tools that are not inside the academic bubble to figure it out.

And so the only people that even consider any of this are people with health problems. Because they actually rode the roller coaster that is the healthcare industry.

There's a common pattern of doctors experiencing severe health problems and then having a Awakening after 20 years of practice where they realize all the mistakes they were making, you can find these people on YouTube

Edited May 4 by integral

[zurew]

On 2025. 05. 04. at 6:47 PM, integral said:

I completely agreed exactly what I want to talk about. Up to this point you've been pushing empiricism onto me?

No i havent . I was going with what you provided.

You were crticizing the system partly because you claimed that they provide  trash results and then you claimed that your approach generated good result - By appealing to results you basically appeal to empirical evidence (information gathered directly or indirectly through observation or experimentation).

So there can be a talk about what constitutes better evidence.

And there can a be a seperate talk about how you can gain knowledge/evidence without experimentation , but in both cases eventually you will have to appeal to results (empirical evidence)

On 2025. 05. 04. at 6:47 PM, integral said:

All of these treatments strategies just don't exist in healthcare industry And the primary reason is because it is not profitable. Do you see the epistemic blind spot? Not because they're not scientifically proven But because it's not part of a doctor's paradigm

Sure it would be convenient for you to claim that the main reason those things are not included is because of profit - they might be or they might not hit their epistemic standard or we can conjure up other reasons.

But again this goes back to my example of determining mind state by counting insects - doing more shit or taking into account more shit doesn't necessarily mean that your approach is automatically better.

As long as you have no clear way to weigh the things on your list , your talk will be empty, doctors have many ways to weigh things for instance evidence hierarchy.

 

The way you show their closed mindedness is by taking their own epistemic framework and showing that some of the methods that they reject , given their standards shouldnt be rejected and they should be taken seriously.

Thats how you change paradigms - you appeal to some meta norms and then given those norms you demonstrate that your stuff scores very well or you establish why the currently existing and used meta norms are trash and you intoduce new ones (but all of the things you listed seem to be compatible with the current ones and they can all be scored using the evidence hierarchy) but its very unlikely that you can pull that off, given that you dont have anything even remotely flashed out.

Running your n=1 is not gonna be persuasive and if you want to argue that it should be then again we can apply that same standard to anything else where people coming up with a random causal explanation should be immediately taken seriously.

First step for you would be to drop the arrogance bullshit and acknowledge that there is room for error. The very fact that you dont even consider the possibility that you could be wrong shows that you are not serious about any of this, you are just bitter because doctors couldnt solve your issue and now you are running a campaign against them.

Some of your valid criticisms become invisible , because you pretend to know more than what you actually know and you make a bunch of claims about doctors that you cant substantiate when pushed on it , the only thing you can do is to appeal to your personal experience which is not nothing but its extremely limited and your biases will distort a lot.

Edited May 6 by zurew