What I'm about to say isn't to deny that inflammation might trigger or contribute to depression. In fact, anyone who thinks depressed people are just self-indulgent whiners and that there is no biochemical basis for depression are simply living in the 1950s.
My wife has clinical depression. To describe depression, as this article does, as just not wanting to get off the couch is hugely insulting to people with clinical depression.
My wife isn't alone in wishing that there was another word for "depression" of the sort arises because your team lost, your dog died, you got passed over for a promotion. Those are disappointing and can be a problem in the short term.
Clinical depression is not just not wanting to get off the couch. It is a profound loss of hope, and the inability to even connect with your previous mental state of what it was like to have hope or find things interesting. The present appears fucked, and even after racking your brain for some way out, every path looks even more dismal. Situations in the real world are often complicated and can be interpreted in more than one way, but to a depressed person, the most terrible interpretation is evaluated as being a very likely outcome. And, just like 9/11 conspiracy theorists construct self-consistent theories by bending facts and through selective filtering, clinically depressed people often build an elaborate, self-consistent understanding that, yes, they and their future are completely fucked.
>What I'm about to say isn't to deny that inflammation might trigger or contribute to depression. In fact, anyone who thinks depressed people are just self-indulgent whiners and that there is no biochemical basis for depression are simply living in the 1950s.
Well, there's also us, who don't believe "depressed people are just self-indulgent whiners" but don't believe depression is just a "biochemical distrubance" either.
Rather, it's a byproduct of a seriously messed up world/society/personal relations landscape, that depressed individuals are more sensitive to or have felt more deeply.
(This is not the same as "situational depression" -- I'm talking about the real deal, where still the causes can be numerous and not known to the sufferer at a conscious level).
(I find the whole "it's all just bio-chemistry" idea akin to reductionistic scientism. It's inherent in the prevalent attittude to not attempt to go beyond that level and question "why the inbalance", except in mechanistic terms).
> Rather, it's a byproduct of a seriously messed up world/society/personal relations landscape, that depressed individuals are more sensitive to or have felt more deeply.
You can proclaim whatever you want, that don't make it true.
For starters, a lot of modern "science" is hastily written papers for research grants or keeping the researcher up there, the majority of which doesn't even hold in a second examination (this was shown in several meta-reviews, including in biology/medicine, e.g.: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... ).
I'm not for reductionism when it comes to complex emergent phenomena like our sense of self and feelings. Especially when things like "depression" (or ADD etc) are not atemporal facts of life, but change with the decades and with interpretation.
Starting with a specific epistemology it's easy to interpret anything in a certain way. Those who've followed 19th and 20th century medicine have seen so many bullshit fads and theories that were debunked later. Even being gay was a medical issue, not many decades ago. No reason to believe "it's really different this time".
Some people treat science like some neutral agent -- as if interests, stupidity, fads and ideology don't play any role in shaping it (they have the idea that the "scientific methodology" sorts everything out). They probably just want a substitute for religion, an authoritative source of knowledge.
Well, it's true that "hastily written papers for research grants" sets a pretty low bar when it comes to the determination of useful truths about anything. But it's also true that it's a bar that your opinion doesn't even come close to clearing.
I'm glad that you're not "for" reductionism when it comes to complex emergent phenomena, but I'm not sure anyone is "for" reductionism. Some people are "for" useful abstraction.
Epistemologies... my take on them is as follows. An epistemology restricts the ways in which something can be interpreted. Periodically, this has indeed been a problem. I am not sure that it is the problem you are describing; I think perhaps you mean to say that starting with an arbitrary epistemology, its easy to interpret anything to justify prior beliefs. As soon as you formalized your epistemology, though, it would start to lock you into its logic. What sounds right would take more and more work to justify if it was not, in fact, true. That's one of the benefits of having an epistemology. That's also one of the reasons there is a history of prior false belief for you to point at. All of the "fads" you mention are beliefs that can no longer be justified within the context of a scientific method. They are not arbitrary fads; they arose out of specific, historical misapprehensions, and it is not that they cannot be individually repeated; they categorically cannot be repeated. Within the context of a specific, logically coherent method, error runs out of space. Comparing the methods and knowledge of late 20th century medicine to those of early 19th century medicine --- should you chose to --- would refute the point you are trying to make.
Meanwhile, you are responding to a person who has related his first-hand experiences and observations about a personally tragic case of clinical depression with a glib, slightly incoherent and profoundly reductionistic non-theory about the causes of his wife's illness. This is probably the product of a messed up personal relations landscape, but I will tell you that it is one to which I am extremely sensitive. Nothing is inherently false just because you pulled it out of your ass, but it is not a reliable method of producing anything you should share with anyone without making damn sure it is to the point and useful.
>But it's also true that it's a bar that your opinion doesn't even come close to clearing.
Yeah, that's were traditionally people engage in discussion and evaluating each other's arguments (and even each other's opinions). Instead of expecting to settle things with some link to some research here or there, that they know even less about it that the ones that conducted it, and they have at best took a quick read of the final paper, without attempting to verify the results or anything.
Really, scientific papers, as far as their consumers in popular science are concerned, are not more than the holy scriptures of yore. Something you believe because it comes from a source of Truth.
Personally, if I'm allowed to say so, I don't believe in anything not mature enough to make it to a university syllabus. That would be 20 years and several papers by different authors at least to get to that.
>As soon as you formalized your epistemology, though, it would start to lock you into its logic. What sounds right would take more and more work to justify if it was not, in fact, true. That's one of the benefits of having an epistemology.
That's only true if epistemologies are not, like religion, flexible. But epistemologies are not some external entities, they are practiced and believed by fallible (like everyone) people.
>Meanwhile, you are responding to a person who has related his first-hand experiences and observations about a personally tragic case of clinical depression with a glib, slightly incoherent and profoundly reductionistic non-theory about the causes of his wife's illness.
Well, I'll have to disagree about the "slightly incoherent and profoundly reductionistic non-theory" part. Modern life is out of touch with the human animal and messed up, what's incoherent about it? It's an insight we celebrate in our most famous poets, writers, artists and philosophers. It's also something that can be gauged by the increase of depression incidents in particular countries and particular decades.
And who told you I, and people close to me, haven't experience depression? It's not like that persons first hand experiences are the be all end all, and it's not like first hand experience mean that much in any case.
There are all kinds of people with a wrong opinion (could be me, for example, as I'm saying this) that had "first had experiences" that got them to that opinion.
Philosophy and science aren't opposed. Philosophy is conjecture about fields in which we don't know enough to have a science, yet. This is not a dig at philosophy; it's important to keep searching for answers so that we do get enough evidence to build a science.
I think there are at least some philosophical topics which are non-objective by nature. Consider whether to be a solipsist. ;) More seriously, if you don't believe in an objective morality, then moral philosophy is a subject which qualifies.
Something that is non-objective by nature is a matter of faith, not philosophy.
I do believe in objective morality. Morality is simply the study of what we should do. What should we do? That question is perfectly open to scientific enquiry.
If Hume was right---that the question cannot be answered scientifically---then that's the end of moral philosophy and the beginning, perhpas, of morality based in faith. but I do not agree with Hume.
>The substitute for religion is philosophy, not science.
Philosophy has not offered me the easy, yet wholly unsatisfying, answers that my baptist upbringing did.
I wouldn't say that it is the best substitute for religion.
Way to back your claim with reason and evidence, SamReidHughes. You think coldtea is blathering? Prove it.
There's a huge difference between "blathering", i.e. incoherence, and disagreement. If you truly find coldtea's comment incoherent, you may have an issue with reading comprehension.
> Rather, it's a byproduct of a seriously messed up world/society/personal relations landscape, that depressed individuals are more sensitive to or have felt more deeply.
- Even if this were true, that doesn't preclude depression from causing biochemical changes (e.g. inflammation).
- Saying this is the only cause of depression doesn't make a lot of sense because it doesn't account for, say, post-surgical or post-viral depression.
> Rather, it's a byproduct of a seriously messed up world/society/personal relations landscape, that depressed individuals are more sensitive to or have felt more deeply.
As I went to bed last night, I found myself thinking about this comment.
A couple of years ago, I was working at a well-known tech company and doing very well. My boss was a legitimate, clinical psychopath, but I made the most of it, working hard, coming in on weekends and snow days, etc. For my effort and talent, I received a raise and super-secret "restricted stock units we only give to the people we want to keep" after only a few months. My final performance review was glowing.
Having had enough of my boss and feeling that I'd built up enough runway to make a jump, I asked my boss's boss for a transfer to a different manager. The request was received positively and as it was in process, my immediate boss found out (probably from another manager asking about me) and summarily fired me. The act of cleaning out my desk and saying an awkward goodbye to people in the office is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.
Because he had neglected to consult with his management chain about it, he was also out the door as soon as the threat of a lawsuit from me had passed a few months later. (If you're wondering, I did make some empty legal threats after the fact, which is why I couldn't go back. In retrospect, I probably could have returned if I'd kept my cool. I regret this mistake more than anything I did beforehand, without a doubt.)
Since then, I've suffered from PTSD, extreme anxiety and secondary depression, have been almost completely unemployed and largely withdrew from normal society. I don't have many friends anymore, don't date, don't go out... I basically just keep to myself, code, and play video games. Interacting with people didn't work out so well, so I guess, subconsciously and maybe a little consciously, I just decided not to deal with them anymore.
Getting back to your comment, @coldtea, I've often wondered which is true: Do I (a) have a "chemical imbalance" caused by unmet life expectations that causes me to be anxious and depressed or am I (b) depressed because the veil that had theretofore kept me from seeing/understanding the true shitty nature of the world was lifted?
I find my mind frequently drifting into "wow, everything is fucked up" territory. And there's plenty of fuel to keep the engine running. Everything from terrorism to wealth inequality to labor destruction to race issues to dictatorships to privacy loss to partisan gridlock in Washington... the world is absolutely and in a thousand different ways, flagrantly unfair. Then I get even further depressed about feeling depressed when I compare my relatively cushy life to that of, say, a Palestinian or Ugandan.
Wealth (and as a corollary, race) inequality is the one that gets me the most. Technology is advancing to post-scarcity -- the point where there are enough resources on this globe that everyone should be able to make it by with minimal (or even zero) effort.
But that's not what's happening. Keynes was wrong about the 15-hour work week of the future. Instead, we've gotten a bi-modal distribution of the disgustingly wealthy and growing numbers (in the US) of the destitute who have to work more hours at degrading jobs just to get by. Most people still have to work at things they do not enjoy, an artificial construct held in place by the powers that be. In this 21st century, there is enough to go around, it's just not distributed properly.
To be clear, I don't mind working and have a long history of hopefully-interesting side-projects (which I'd hoped would break me out of the must-work 99% group). What I do mind is working for "them" because I need to make X dollars to live in the world "they" have constructed. Even when I did work for "them" I didn't hate it. But now... it's harder to accept.
What pill is going to make me forget these harsh realities of the world? What pill is going to make me say "Oh sure, I'll get a wife and have some kids, even though they'll be relegated to psuedo-slavery just like I am." None.
So I think what you said (which I quoted above) is dead-right. Because of an event in my life, my eyes were opened to the real unfairness of the world.
And that's the real reason I struggle with depression -- my understanding of the world improved.
My wife isn't alone in wishing that there was another
word for "depression" of the sort arises because your
team lost, your dog died, you got passed over for a
promotion. Those are disappointing and can be a problem
in the short term.
FWIW, depression resulting from those sorts of events is typically termed "situational depression." Regarding everything else you said: totally on board. And I wish you and your wife lots of strength and luck.
I agree that depression is an overused word and wish your wife the best.
However, the article absolutely does not say that depression is "just not wanting to get off the couch". It specifically states that this is referred to as sickness behaviour, not depression, and the very next paragraph contrasts them as distinct but superficially similar.
I'm someone who has ranged from what I would call mild to moderate depression. I've had periods approaching year-scale where I found no particular joy and struggled to find any hope. I immersed myself in reading and work, and lived a difficult, one-dimensional life.
I have no idea how that compares to your wife's experience. I'm not particularly interested in drawing comparisons.
I would like to ask you: why does your wife need a different word? Why not just say one bout of depression is more severe and one is more mild?
To me it's the same as autism or cancer or any other sickness. Sometimes it's a challenge, and sometimes it's a wrecking ball through your life. What's inadequate about using an adjective for that?
The need for a different word comes from a bit of linguistic trickery we tend to perform.
Because we tend to think of people with "depression" as being "depressed", we are apt to ask questions, like, "What do you have depression about?"
This question makes no more sense than "What do you have cancer about?" (thanks to Stephen Fry for the comparison) but because it does make sense to ask, "What are you depressed about?" it can be difficult to explain this to people.
Physiologically, it isn't at all clear that "depression" and "being depressed" are species of the same genus. The latter is a transient, perfectly healthy, emotional state. The former is a persistent, unhealthy neuro-physical state.
So having less similar words for things of a different kind that are often confused would be a good thing.
Just for those curious about the Fry quote, I think it might originate from his blog, himself quoting Alastair Campbell. At the very least there's a nice reference to it, and I'm happily crawling along the links enjoying it.
Because stories like yours, in context, tend to say (in subtext or not) "I was sad once but then I did X and I was fine, so what are you whining about? Just go do X!" This often includes an implication that the depressed person should not receive empathy, comfort, or even respect because their failure to make themselves 'snap out of it' indicates a moral weakness that ought to be punished. The statement may or may not include something along the lines of "she just likes drama" or "she just wants attention."
From the perspective of someone with a more or less normal emotional range, this kind of makes internal sense. You've been sad before, you equate that with the depressed person's mental state, and then you think, "Wait, when I was sad, at least I didn't Y or mope around in front of my friends or ask for disability accomodiations, etc. That person is weak and needy and whining." If your experiences were, in fact, equivalent, that might be valid.
But they are not. Not close. Not by several orders of magnitude. It's like seeing someone throw up and chiding them for not knowing their limits, when in fact they are in chemotherapy.
But then posts like yours are at risk of saying "you only think you had depression, but you got better, so fuck you for faking it you liar. I have real depression".
It's not that "your experience wasn't real depression" because people experience it differently and "real" depression is a uselessly ill-defined concept.
It is that "your experience does not make you qualified to pass negative judgements on others who are probably experiencing something very different from you."
Okay, but you will get that even if you use differet words for depression. You could say "I have 'detailed-specific-cancer-name", and people will give you bullshit advice about some other totally different cancer.
Changing the name of a diagnosis does nothing to reduce ignorance of that diagnosis.
The other replies have beat me to the punch, and they have it right. Other people have been depressed about things in the passing sense of depression, and they think whatever got them out of their depression will also work for my wife, and they often share their advice with her. After hearing scores of simplistic suggestions, my wife is reluctant to describe herself as having depression: not out of shame or embarrassment, but because she wants to avoid the maddening anger she feels when a well-intentioned person glibly offers advice.
"Oh, that is so sad. When I had depression, I found that picking up a new hobby, like gardening, did wonders for me! I have some gardening books you can borrow."
"Depression? Well, the trick is to just put whatever it is that caused it behind you."
"How can you be depressed? You look great, you have a wonderful family, and you are in good health! Stop focusing on the negative and open your eyes to the great things you have!"
"Where do you attend church?" ... "Oh, you don't? What you need to do is let Jesus Christ into your life. God has a wonderful plan for you and I'm sure you'll be better once you open your ears and listen to His message. Once you realize that Jesus walks with you every step and loves you unconditionally, it will absolutely lift your spirits up!"
"I was depressed too, but then I found this wonderful energy worker. He completely reshaped my life energy field and I've never felt better. What is your email? You need to call him today!"
All of those people say exactly the same thing about cancer. "You should try this tea!"
John Diamond (died of throat cancer) wrote some books about it.
It doesn't matter what you call a mental illness: you're going to find ignorant idiots giving stupid worthless advice or voicing their horrible uninformed stigmatising opinion as if it's obvious fact.
Different word because there is a colloquial meaning "I am depressed because my car died on the way to work" or "Wow, that movie was depressing." which isn't even in the same ballpark as the disease.
Thank you for posting this. As someone who has dealt with crippling Major Depressive Disorder for over half of my 30 years so far, and who would not be alive without SSRIs, these kinds of misunderstandings on the topic of depression are gravely insulting.
> clinically depressed people often build an elaborate, self-consistent understanding that, yes, they and their future are completely fucked
Which reinforces the apathy and anhedonia, which (assuming you're aware of them) just feed back into the mental model. Obvious vicious circle is obvious, but still vicious.
> My wife isn't alone in wishing that there was another word for "depression" of the sort
You won't be understood (my girlfriend is a psychiatrist, so I can guaranteed it's never used medically) but 'acedia' is a lost Latin word that corresponds well: it was the original word for the cardinal sin now known as Sloth, and was described as a profound and dark disease of the soul. How the sin changed is a fascinating piece of spiritual and theological history -- shifting the definition of sins from things that hurt you to things you can do something about. Now that clinical depression is something that offers potential treatment options, that debate might re-enter the rarefied spheres of moral debates.
I absolutely believe depression and inflammation are linked.
I have tested this myself (n=1) as I suffer from an ongoing depression. I also have a brother who has withdrawn from the world completely and I would consider that he is highly crippled from depression.
My realisation that this problem is linked to inflammation occured a few years ago. My depression was at it's worst and I was barely functioning. I am still not who I was but I'm doing ok.
While I was at my worst, I considered that perhaps my diet contributed to my poor health.
Through careful testing I discovered that foods with gluten or casein protein caused me to feel awful. After removing these foods 100% from my diet, there was an improvement but certainly not a full recovery.
I've always had bad seasonal allergies but I had never considered that my whole body was inflamed. Strangely, by chance, I found that fexofenadine (an antihistamine) would lift my depression temporarily after taking it for a week. If I continued taking it, then slowly the depression came back. My best explanation is that the signaling process of inflammation dampens the ability for my brain to think clearly. Since discovering this, I found other things that helped:
I quit caffeine 100% as it seemed to also have a negative effect for me (when for years it lifted my depression, now it's clear I am best to do without).
I no longer drink alcohol.
I've worked hard to remove sugar and processed foods.
I've found that daily running will help lift my depression greatly.
Another helpful item I found was licorice tea which I use sparingly. This had powerful anti-inflammatory properties which I have found useful.
For years I had very bad sleep habits. I've corrected these and always sleep to a schedule now. Even so, I still rarely wake up feeling rested.
I feel much better than I used to and can get by but still do not feel quite right. I'm looking into meditation now.
There are a large number of other things (including SSRI's) I've tried/tested but I can't go into all these right now.
I've been pretty careful in my experimentation, I have been testing this for years now and know what works for me but I suspect depression has more than a single cause.
My best advice to everyone is to exercise, eat healthy and try to lead a balanced lifestyle.
I just want to add something I forgot to mention. I've also learnt that isolation is generally something best avoided while depressed. It may feel counter intuitive when you are in that state of mind but I've had a spontaneous lift from depression on multiple occasions when I have been in social situations. To withdraw is not a good idea.
You say you still rarely get restful sleep. Have you had any formal sleep studies? Lack of quality sleep can cause a lot of the problems you have experienced, so you might consider getting one done. Also, your doctor should know how to differentiate between obstructive sleep apnea, central sleep apnea, and any other issues you think may be contributing to your problem.
It sounds like actively trying to do anything seems to have helped you, regardless of what it is. Perhaps making an effort to do something (anything) is what is helping you, and not the acts themselves.
Anecdata here - as a teen, I had depression. I would take ibuprofen a few times a day when it got really bad, it helped a lot. It would lift my mood from dulled, paralysing rumination to merely sad. I think I started doing it after reading a study like the one in the link.
It's a popular theory there are many different diseases that fall under the label 'depression', which is why patients often try multiple antidepressants until one works - perhaps this inflammatory one is just one of them.
The "is" is more of a "might be". But it does seem fairly plausible. (The inverse seems less likely- that depression has absolutely nothing to do with the body.) I'm guessing that as with most complex phenomena, depression has a range of causal factors, and results from an interplay of many things.
It will definitely be great if further research in this area helps to lessen the stigma around depression and other ailments.
I think this is extremely possible. During my research into Paleo (which has helped me tremendously, and I suggest anyone who has trouble keeping off the pounds, performing at work, or focusing in life to take a look at it), I've considered the possible link myself, but since I'm not a scientist I didn't have any way of looking into this.
However, one of Paleo's major goals is to eliminating inflammation, and Paleo, for a large number of people, have lessened or completely eliminated the symptoms of depression, and I've seriously considered that there has to be some sort of link.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here. n=1 experimental data may not be the best thing, but in the absence of studies like the one linked to, its all we have to go on.
Paleo mostly helps because it eliminates refined sugar. It may eliminate some very mild symptoms of depression because sugar causes mild depression after the initial sugar high. Other than eliminating refined sugar, paleo is not very useful and there are much healthier sugar free diets out there.
And the scientific justification for paleo is just false. Ancient humans did not eat that much meat.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you put in a mostly off-topic plug for paleo, so a response was justified.
They demonstrate the truth that humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers who can survive comfortably on a huge range of diets, so anyone selling any particular narrowly defined diet--like "Paleo"--as in any way particularly "natural" to humans is in a state of evolution-denial that would make the average Creationist proud.
> Which hunter–gatherer tribe are we supposed to mimic, exactly? How do we reconcile the Inuit diet—mostly the flesh of sea mammals—with the more varied plant and land animal diet of the Hadza or !Kung? Chucking the many different hunter–gather diets into a blender to come up with some kind of quintessential smoothie is a little ridiculous.
> recent understanding of the human genome has shown that modern humans typically have many copies of the AMY1 gene for starch digestion—suggesting widespread evolutionary adaptation to starch consumption by humans
Yes, there are native inuit whose diets are nearly 100% meat. But we do not all have their genes. Genetically, they are just a branch of humanity. The average person has very little likelihood to have native inuit genes, thus there is no reason to believe their body is adapted to a diet of 100% meat.
We did all come from more temperate climates and in such places, plant food is much more easily available than meat. Also, in most temparate places hunting for wild animals with stone age tools and without horses is very difficult and it is very unlikely that the prehistoric humans could get much meat at all.
There are stone age tribes in Africa and Brazil, and they usually eat very little meat, because it is very hard to obtain.
There's no need to believe or disbelieve. Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Karsen Anderson showed back around 1930 that it wasn't a special adaptation of the Inuit people. They and their fellow explorers of European descent were healthy on a diet of fish and meat. Stefansson spent 9 years of 11 years of Arctic exploration living on a meat diet.
I feel like this is one of those instances where someone is responding to a different conversation (not necessarily you, but many of the respondents). Who said Paleo is scientific? A diet along those lines, for me, reduces mood swings, hunger, and the combination (hangriness), while being tasty and improving the list of numbers they measure at the doctor's office. We do all have to live with our n=1, after all. Eat what's truly tasty and makes your life good!
Somewhere there is a flame war about what the Paleolithic humans ate, and whether that was what we are nicknaming "paleo" now. We shouldn't take the names too seriously, though, or we'll be confused about what the South Beach diet is (big macs?), the Beyonce diet (...?), etc. Low-fat and low-cholesterol diets have accurately descriptive names. Not catchy. Also once seemingly backed by science, which was incomplete enough to be wrong or influenced heavily by agricultural lobbyists.
An discussion about whether "reducing inflammation" as discussed on the internet is scientific would be interesting. The article mentions curcumin and omega-3s: what do we really know?
>> You are getting down-voted because Paleo is not scientific.
Weather or not the basis of Paleo is sound is not relevant to his point. Not only does he claim benefits for himself, but notes that others seem to agree in similar ways.
I'm really getting pissed at the commercial medial establishment for denying anything that doesn't have clinical trial can be good. Plants or minerals that have helped people for thousands of years are called "homeopathic" or "alternative" by real doctors. Now we're seeing studies that claim various things have no benefit "for people on an already healthy diet" as a footnote. Yet good old aspirin is a plant derivative, as are some other things. But I digress. His point is independent of the basis for the diet and hence should not be downvoted for that.
We also have centuries of history which show that practices people thought were good actually did nothing, or made things worse. People got better despite the treatment, which caused them to believe that the treatment was the success.
It took over 1,000 years for the humorism of Ancient Greece to be discarded as wrong, and Hippocrates' theories on bloodletting, once a mainstay of medicine, to be relegated to only a few modern uses.
Mercury has been a part of traditional medicines for thousands of years across Eurasia. "There is hardly a disease in the nosology for which mercury in some form has not been used." "No doubt many patients died after years of suffering from slow mercurial poisoning." (Quotes from http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020134syphilis... ) .
While mercury still has some medical uses, the fact is that centuries of reports claimed wide benefits and successes for mercury is evidence that claiming benefits for oneself, and the agreement of others, is not strong evidence that it actually is good. It may be good, but it isn't sufficient. It may actually be bad.
There's also drugs which we know are effective, but which are usually riskier and less effective than other drugs. Eg, sulfa drugs vs. beta-lactams. While treating with sulfa drugs absolutely has benefits, promoting it over other, better possibilities leads to overall worse healthcare. That's why sulfas aren't a first line drug any more.
In terms of a Paleo diet, it may be good, or not, or it may be that other diets are better.
How do you know which it is? How do you know which traditional uses of mercury are toxic? Which traditional uses of bloodletting are worse than not doing bloodletting at all? We only have three solutions: trials (which gives the clearest evidence when done right), epidemiology (much harder to interpret), and mechanistic (there's no reason to believe that a leg amputation will help a cold, and the best case outcome quite severe, making it unethical to test that experimentally. This is mostly used to reject unlikely possibilities which have poor evidence backing it.)
> Plants or minerals that have helped people for thousands of years are called "homeopathic" or "alternative" by real doctors.
No, homeopathic medicin is called homeopathic by real doctors. Homeopathy is not ancient, it was invented in 1796. It also does not involve plants of any kind.
Plants that do help or seem to help and have been in use for hundreds or thousands of years are only called alternative when there either has not been research to show that they are effective, or there has been research that shows they are not effective.
Alternative does not necessarily mean bad. The word is merely used as a way to distinguish unproven medicine from scientifically proven medicine.
While I think the parent comment does not understand what "homeopathic" means, I don't think it's correct that "[homeopathy] does not involve plants of any kind." My understanding is that the "active" ingredients are often plant based - after all, it was cinchona overdose that started this mess. If that's the case, homeopathic remedies don't contain the plants anymore (through over-dilution), but homeopathy as a process involves plants.
You really want to go back to the days before evidence based medicine? Really?
Nobody is "denying anything that doesn't have clinical trial can be good." Hardly. It is more like "these people say this is good, now lets prove it." Do we nees more medicinal research? Yes. Is there a billion things we don't understand or know yet? Yes. That doesn't mean we don't learn.
>> You really want to go back to the days before evidence based medicine? Really?
No, quite the opposite. But I also want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence. If individuals or groups of people claim a benefit from something, why should that be rejected without proper investigation?
I stand by my claim that Iodine and Magnesium cured my asthma and I have test data to back it up. Will it work for you? I dunno. But your doctor is unlikely to recommend it and no company is going to do clinical trials.
What you did is called a n=1 study. Since Big Pharma doesn't want to fund research into things they can't profit from, n=1 studies is all we have to understand the science of the human body a lot of the time. Its better than doing things blind.
>> You really want to go back to the days before evidence based medicine? Really?
> No, quite the opposite. But I also want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence.
Science-based medicine is rejecting positive claims when there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis. You can't claim that you want the oppose of abandoning evidence based medicine and simultaneously claim you want people to stop rejecting things due to lack of evidence.
> If individuals or groups of people claim a benefit from something, why should that be rejected without proper investigation?
There's a difference between rejecting something as a justified claim and rejecting it as a hypothesis for which there may be reason for further investigation -- the former is warranted more often than the latter, though even the latter can be warranted when, in addition to a lack of evidence for the claimed causal mechanism, there is a lack of evidence for the phenomenon it explains, or where there is evidence for the phenomenon but there is also sufficient evidence to conclude that an alternative cause to the proposed one was at work.
n=1 studies of treatments for medical conditions frequently suffer from either or both of these problems; particularly the first, as they generally lack sufficient evidence that improvement outside of the range plausible without any intervention occurred.
> I stand by my claim that Iodine and Magnesium cured my asthma and I have test data to back it up.
As iodine deficiency depresses immune function and asthma symptoms are commonly triggered by respiratory infections (either alone or in combination with other environmental factors), I don't think anyone concerned with evidence-based medicine would be surprised that there are people for whom increasing iodine intake reduced or eliminated asthma symptoms. Iodine also has other well-established effects that relate directly to known risk factors for asthma.
> But your doctor is unlikely to recommend it and no company is going to do clinical trials.
Sure, your doctor is unlikely, absent other evidence indicative of an iodine deficiency, to conclude that your asthma is due to an iodine deficiency and recommend that as an appropriate intervention. Because its not particularly likely to be true or an effective intervention.
OTOH, with symptoms that are more closely tied to an iodine deficiency, they are likely to test for that (and with test results showing such a deficiency, they are likely to recommend iodine to correct it.)
I imagine similar things are generally true of magnesium.
When I go through my depression episodes I am unable to eat for days. Food tastes like cardboard and is repulsive. If i eat more than a couple bites I vomit. Yet not eating doesn't make me less depressed.
So the idea of just eliminating the current fad "inflammatory food" just doesn't seem plausible to me. Especially since the food seems to change with time.
Many people resent being told they "just need to cut out grains/meat/sugar/fruit/cooked food." Food fads come and food fads go.
The pillars of a lot of diets seem sound but aren't based on evidence and often ignore it.
I believe the best diet is based on a quote from Michael Pollan; "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I disagree with a lot of what he says but that quote is fantastic.
A quick glance at that article seems its just whats called the Paleo Strawman: it talks about the Paleo name (and how it is connected to the Paleolithic era), but doesn't actually discuss the diet at all and just says "oh, Paleo is wrong because eating what we ate over 10 thousand years ago isn't appropriate for us today", even though the Paleo diet does not say that.
The Paleo diet is about reducing inflammation, reducing toxins, and reducing anti-nutrients. The majority of the three of those comes from refined sugars, grains, seed oils, and legumes. What it DOESN'T do is blindly say "oh, our pre-agricultural ancestors ate that so it must be the best thing ever" because that has no place in Paleo as it is not scientific.
The article proves that Karl S. Kruszelnicki (I've never heard of him before) has no interest in doing research into what he is writing about, because he does not mention any of what I just said in his article.
You could say that about any diet. To vastly simplify Paleo, it's like chicken instead of sugary fruit loops. In other words, it goes counter to what may be convenient to eat, colorful, or marketed and branded really well to consumers. That in itself doesn't make it scientific but it starts with an assumption that the easiest and most popular/likable foods are not necessarily the only foods we should eat for long-term health.
That's fine, keep down-voting. Just as I predicted. Note that in my comment I am not asserting that Paleo is scientific but that it isn't really less scientific than most other diets either. The whole point was that there are many different interpretations of what exactly Paleo even is within the group and some of them are more advanced than just speculating which foods the 'caveman' might have eaten. I agree that if that's all you're basing your diet plan on then you're rather unscientific. FWIW, many primitive people who move to the US and begin changing their diets to more convenient (perhaps cheaper, more available) foods begin experiencing health issues.
Yes, the Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio is the major mechanism (but not only) for the chronic inflammation caused by the modern diet, and yes, that has been pretty well proved.
But theres no major study (besides the submitted link) that I'm aware of that links high inflammation diet to depression, even though, frankly, it's pretty obvious that there is some major link between the two.
So, until the above mentioned study happened, it was pretty much just a large collection of n=1 experiments, where people ate strict Paleo and then, well, became supermen (I'm not actually sure how else to describe it; for some, it was absolutely miraculous).
Fortunately, unless you are an evolution-denialist, you know that human evolution adapted us to a very wide range of dietary factors, so within an extremely broad, shallow optimum pretty much any Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio will do. To argue otherwise would be to say that the human dietary optimum is narrow and deep, which is maximally implausible for an opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavenger.
Canola oil is a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids (ALA). Among vegetable cooking oils, it is the best one. The fat composition is likely 'better' than olive oil.
The reason why the word depression is too general is because depression is a normal conceptial state that everyone will endure at least once in life. Real, debilitating, actual depression, is life-long and persist regardless of any one event. It's not just a function of the mind or an emotional relationship related to life, but an absence that can only be described as emotionally detached, sociopathic, and even as an obligation of guilt and doubt simply for existing in a time you can't accept.
To consider "something" as just _in the mind_ v/s being physically rooted is similar too considering software bugs trivial b/c software can easily be changed compared to hardware that is broken.
To extend the analogy - asking a depressive patient to just sort it out mentally is like trying to debug a debugger using that same debugger!?
I wonder if this doesn't also cause the symptoms associated with fibromyalgia. I've always been fairly skeptical about Fibromyalgia but try not to be for the same reasons it's not productive to be skeptical about clinical depression as s disease, but perhaps they are both linked to inflamation.
I had a severe back issue that resulted in a lot of inflammation. Inflammation that was tested to levels about 5x of the average 90 year old -- when I was 22!
It was pure misery... I would get sick often, get tired, etc. It sucked. When I was given Vioxx for a few weeks, which made me feel like a million bucks!
You might as well check for your pulse: inflammation isn't a disease, it's a signaling system used by your body. The problem is that often your body reaction has potential to causes problems of it's own.
Think of it like the police. For some things (white person is speeding, deserves a ticket), their reaction can be fine and appropriate. Under other circumstances (black person selling cigarettes illegally), they are more of a problem than the one they are intended to solve.
Yes, you can just ask your regular doctor to do this for you. Although if you happen to already have a sports medicine doctor, they might be more accustomed to doing these sorts of tests. Harj actually has a post on this here: http://blog.harjtaggar.com/my-experiments-with-preventing-he...
Your inflammation levels can vary a lot throughout the day and week though, so unless you're going to get it measured 10+ times then you're probably not going to get great data. So it might just be easier to look for an open clinical trial that you can enroll in where they will do this for you for free.
There's honestly a very simple recipe to combat about 85% of depression. The other 15% does require SSRI / therapy / etc.
- Clean up your sleep.
- Clean up your diet.
- Exercise, at full intensity, for 8-15 minutes a day. Weight training mixed in as well.
- Get sunlight or supplement with Vitamin D.
Yea, not sure why you are getting downvoted. Could anyone comment why downvotes? All sounds like reasonable advice (except that, of course, numbers like 85/15% is a bit handwavy, but I don't think author meant them to be precise).
What's "very suspicious" about the account? Checked, and he's been active for a year and a half, has posted 2 stories, and has participated in the comments a little more.
That the 2 stories are both from Guardian could just mean it's one other outlet he regularly reads besides HN. Heck, I read it too, and I'm not even British. Maybe because it's one of the best news sources? (and far better than most US based news outlets).
Your account didn't have activity for ages and has only 1 other submission from 320 days ago and last comment from 207 days ago. Sorry if this is not the case.
My wife has clinical depression. To describe depression, as this article does, as just not wanting to get off the couch is hugely insulting to people with clinical depression.
My wife isn't alone in wishing that there was another word for "depression" of the sort arises because your team lost, your dog died, you got passed over for a promotion. Those are disappointing and can be a problem in the short term.
Clinical depression is not just not wanting to get off the couch. It is a profound loss of hope, and the inability to even connect with your previous mental state of what it was like to have hope or find things interesting. The present appears fucked, and even after racking your brain for some way out, every path looks even more dismal. Situations in the real world are often complicated and can be interpreted in more than one way, but to a depressed person, the most terrible interpretation is evaluated as being a very likely outcome. And, just like 9/11 conspiracy theorists construct self-consistent theories by bending facts and through selective filtering, clinically depressed people often build an elaborate, self-consistent understanding that, yes, they and their future are completely fucked.