What I've learned that, as an adult in 2024 in the United States, you cannot take for granted:
- That your medical professionals are acting in your best interest
- That your insurance company is acting in your best interest
- That your medical professional knows what they are talking about
- That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you
- That the legal level of pollutants in the water, air, ground, walls, floors, etc are actually safe or even being measured properly
- That you aren't being subjected to something that later will be found to be unhealthy, even if it is currently known, until it is litigated in retrospect
- That you can afford the treatment that would be necessary to make yourself healthy
- That anyone in the industries that would normally protect you (healthcare, insurance, public health, government, etc) even care to do so
I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad.
So I am not surprised to see this, and expect to see more of it.
>I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad
I think the problem is that you were raised to think that a "good and just" world is one where there is no risk, no variability, and limited self-reliance. This is a fiction and has never existed.
The default state is for none of these services and protections to exist whatsoever. Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape.
Honestly, as a society we should be able to guarantee most if not all of those. Every single one of them is an economic trade-off and when you put for profit companies in the loop, it’s obvious that they will prioritize their profits.
The system is for profit by choice, it is under our control as society to guarantee that list or not, and we have chosen not to.
Might be the right or wrong decision, that’s up to each of you, but denying it’s has been chosen it’s very naive
It's beyond economic trade-off. You're talking about full perfect control over people's behaviours.
> That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you
You can get water intoxication by literally drinking too much clean water. How are you going to get anywhere close to controlling that?
> That your medical professional knows what they are talking about
You just lost all medical staff, because they're people and people make mistakes. Even when they don't, people are extremely fuzzy puzzles and we don't have enough tests available to do precise diagnosis of lots of things.
The challenge with medicine, if one is dealing with a known condition, there's a known intervention. And Any number of simple and straightforward tests will make it easy.
It's with the unknown conditions, that doesn't fall into the mental flow chart of a medical professional's mental model are SOL.
The real answer to most folk's chronic conditions are lifestyle interventions, but of course, medical professionals most difficult challenge is ensuring compliance. The only tools available for a medical professional to a patient is to beg, plead, threaten, yell, discuss the interventions till they are blue in the face, but unfortunately, you can lead a horse to water, but can't force them to drink.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to admit is that a lot of health issues are both self-inflicted through lifestyle choices, and it creates an negative feedback loop of demand for professionals to be able to truly have more time to care for the patients that truly need help.
I think a decent number of them are non-economic statements, particularly the motives for doctors, insurance, and interests.
>The system is for profit by choice, it is under our control as society to guarantee that list or not, and we have chosen not to.
The system is for profit by choice, because most people care about themselves. It would very hard to make your doctor care more about your life than theirs, or care about your kids more than their kids.
You can institute harsh criminal penalties for doctors like some suggest in this thread, but even then, they are still putting themselves first.
Im not sure I'm "denying" any choice. Im just stating how it is. I have no doubt the world would be different if people chose different - which is a tautological claim.
I dont think it is depressing. I think it is marvelous and a testament to human engineering, perseverance, and collective spirit that we hold things together.
As I said down thread, it is something to be grateful for, given that we are always one major catastrophe away from robbing and killing each other in the street.
While sure, things could be better, I think it is overly cynical to consider the status quo garbage. If you wanna see some real garbage, go to Haiti, Donetsk, or Liberia and report back about US society isnt "good and just".
I'd challenge you to attack it logically on it's merits. I think parent poster is obvipusly right, civilization exists on a precipice at all times. The natural state of the universe is toward entropy.
That's not to say we can't make it better, just that we should have no illusions about its stability.
> I think the problem is that you were raised to think that a "good and just" world is one where there is no risk, no variability, and limited self-reliance.
I think that children are generally raised to not believe there is "risk" associated with listening to experts. This means specialists like Doctors but also politicians and military officials.
The idea that there could be a grift set up to take advantage of people in the medical space, for instance, which is highly regulated and supposed to be for the benefit of people first and for generating capital second, is not intuitive to children.
In fact a wide array of industries and services in the United States, and the world (to not be political, as some commenter said) are set up to take advantage of children or naive young adults.
Secondary education and student loans is a glaring example of this.
> The default state is for none of these services and protections to exist whatsoever
In all of human history this is mostly untrue. Humans have always formed societies, and those societies have always provided services for their people. In fact, before capitalism, most of these services were provided in-kind as a right of being a part of the tribe.
This idea that every person is born as an individual and nothing is granted to them belongs to a certain political ideology that is designed to make sure people feel entitled to nothing, and keep things in the private industry, and keep government small. But I digress.
Of course someone has to provide the service, and collect the materials for the service. And that person deserves to be compensated for that work. But the idea that the default state of a human is to be alone with nature and subject to pure individualism is simply not true, and never has been the norm, until that idea was used to justify not providing people with anything.
> Everything beyond nothing is an imperfect and unstable solution held together with duct-tape
This idea is also untrue. We've had a lot of time to perfect these things. If we can build skyscrapers and infrastructure to maintain them, we can provide these services. You are conflating political ideology and economic motivation with literal ability. The ability is absolutely there, and was in the past as well. There is something different going on that causes these systems to be "held together with duct-tape" and it's actually other humans actively trying to destroy these systems, not that they are impossible.
I almost completely agree, and think we mainly disagree on the nuances.
>The idea that there could be a grift set up to take advantage of people in the medical space, for instance, which is highly regulated and supposed to be for the benefit of people first and for generating capital second, is not intuitive to children.
The first thing I wanted to touch on is the idea of grift. Just because some has their interests ahead of yours doesn't mean they are a grifter. I think the childish view is the expectation that other people put your interests above their own, like the selflessness of a loving parent. A doctor doesnt put your individual wellbeing above their own, but that doesnt make them a grifter or a bad person. Expecting that kind of selflessness is entirely unrealistic, and is what causes cognitive dissonance when it clashes with reality. Thats not to say that grifters dont exist, who actively manipulate and deceive, but simply having unrealistic expectations for something does not make it a grift.
One example would when a doctor doesn't provide the depth of care and consideration the patient wants or would expect from a selfless caregiver. Most people come to the realization that they need to provide the drive and motivation for their own care, and doctors are just hired experts to help with things you cant do. You have to manage them and tell them what you want them to do. If you dont manage them like hired help, they will do very little indeed.
>Humans have always formed societies, and those societies have always provided services for their people. In fact, before capitalism, most of these services were provided in-kind as a right of being a part of the tribe. This idea that every person is born as an individual and nothing is granted to them belongs to a certain political ideology that is designed to make sure people feel entitled to nothing, and keep things in the private industry, and keep government small. But I digress.
I didnt mean to say that everyone is an island and forever alone. I mean that these things are not guaranteed entitlements, but conditional on human relations, standing, and mutual exchange. That is to say, they took work to maintain and were subject to constant scrutiny and mutual consent. Even in a tribe, goods and services were not provided unconditionally as some human birthright associated with tribal membership. Instead, they were conditional on good standing and mutual consent.
>This idea is also untrue. We've had a lot of time to perfect these things. If we can build skyscrapers and infrastructure to maintain them, we can provide these services. You are conflating political ideology and economic motivation with literal ability. The ability is absolutely there, and was in the past as well. There is something different going on that causes these systems to be "held together with duct-tape" and it's actually other humans actively trying to destroy these systems, not that they are impossible.
Im not arguing that beneficial institutions and functional societies are beyond human ability. Im saying their existence should not be taken for granted.
The quality of the American medical system has deteriorated to such a point that if the Doctors are not the grifters they may at least be culpable for enabling the grift.
That hasn't been my experience. I have never experienced or heard of a doctor deceiving or lying in real life. I dont think I can think of an example from hospitals either.
I've had dentists discover that I needed a filling after they found out how good my dental insurance was. Their justification was that the tooth seemed "soft". They never took an X-ray or provide any other data than that.
I don't know, but in hindsight I would have asked for an X-Ray. I think it was a borderline call and they went on the side of doing it because I had good insurance.
I don't see anything wrong or nefarious with deciding a borderline call based on ability to pay.
Better preventative medicine and proactive treatment is one of the perks of having good insurance, so I would expect a recommendation from a good dentist to take it into account.
Ideally there is some discussion, but at the same time, the idea that someone with great insurance would want to use it seems a reasonable assumption.
> I have never experienced or heard of a doctor deceiving or lying in real life.
Meet Dr. Stella Immanuel who tells her patients that medications are made from alien DNA and that their illnesses are caused by demon sperm. In the USA she gets to keep her medical license/practice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Immanuel)
See also: every doctor that accepted bribes from Purdue Pharma in exchange for knowingly prescribing excessive amounts of opioids to people who never needed them.
I actually really liked that article and how it at least tried to present both sides. However, I tend to agree with the opposing side, but think there are some edge cases that could be improved. I have spent my career working in drug and device development so I probably have a more nuanced view informed by my experience. I have payed millions to doctors, and think my actions are justified.
One thing that the article touched on that I like is the role of non-industry associations, which I think could do a lot more to spread information. However, there's no one that will pay them to do it.
> I have payed millions to doctors, and think my actions are justified.
You aren't at all worried that paying those doctors will result in them prescribing something to a patient when they might not have otherwise or influence their choice for one option over another? I'm not talking about the education or awareness a doctor might get, purely the influence of the money/benefits and perhaps their hope to get more of the same from you later.
The vast majority of the payments are either education or payment for services rendered, like the article mentions.
At a high level, companies actually think their products have value to patients and want doctors to know about what it can do. It is virtually impossible to decouple knowledge sharing from influence. The point of knowledge sharing is to impact choice and behavior.
On the services front, If I want to hire a doctor to fly across the country and do Brian surgery on a pig or cadaver, I expect to have to pay them. Similarly, if they are running a clinical trial, I expect to fly them to the surgical training and feed them, and pay for their time.
>purely the influence of the money/benefits and perhaps their hope to get more of the same from you later.
Direct kickbacks for prescriptions are a thing of the past. It is pretty hard to come up with a situation where future benefits is conditional on the behavior. Like, I suppose you wouldn't invite a doctor that doesnt use your product to give feedback on it or be part of a clinical trial, but that is a niche feedback to worry about.
Lastly, articles like are very misleading when it comes to the details. In their reference for $2B in payments [1], includes things like Royalties.
>The greatest proportion (27.3%) of value was from royalty or license payments (≈$484 million of $1.8 billion) followed by service fees (26.6%), such as faculty lectures ($472 million of $1.8 billion).
If they are claiming paying royalty or license payments for inventions (like developing a hip implant) are a kickback, it frames the whole argument as rhetoric.
I’ve found the “collective common knowledge” regarding pop-culture topics such as this, is much like generals preparing for the last war they fought.
Direct kickbacks were an actual problem decades ago. That has long been “solved” all the way to the typical over correction the industry is known for.
The same holds true for the opioid epidemic and folks still thinking pill mills and the medical industry as a whole are the primary way folks get hooked.
It’s fighting last decades battles that have long since moved on. The zeitgeist seems to “stick” each generation and does not seem to keep up with current reality.
yes. Conflating Perdue Pharma/OxyContin with the larger opiate epidemic is a particularly egregious example.
Perdue engaged in criminal actions, but it did not cause the epidemic. It is just a small part of the story. Deceitful labeling and aggressive marketing of OxyContin in the 90's has zero bearing on people dying from fentanyl laced weed in 2024.
I think the biggest factor in all of this misinformation is a human desire to compress the complexity of life into simple soundbite narratives that make sense.
The more emotionally charged or pressing an issue is, the greater the human desire is to think/feel like they have it all figured out. Even if that means sacrificing truth.
Humans have a compulsion to categorize and explain everything they encounter. Failure to do so is cognitively painful so anything too difficult is simplified until it "makes sense".
In my opinion, this compulsion is at the heart of all human problems, but also all of our achievements.
My dental surgeon refuses to design or install an implant. They will only put in the screw for the implant.
Why? Because of a pyramid scheme.
That might not be a direct "lie," but it is misleading. Doctors mislead constantly. They tend to accept norms that are harmful because they are systems outside of their control.
I think there is a conflation occurring between harm and sub-optimal behavior (from your perspective). Is the doctor harmful or simply less helpful than you would like?
Would you be better off with no dental work or healthcare? Zero harm is being done in this case IMO.
If Im alone in the desert dying, I dont think others are harming me for my lack of water and food. That is simple neutrality and indifference.
I don't think you understand what a pyramid scheme is. There are some unethical providers who optimize for their own profit rather than the patient's best interests but those are a small minority. And it is entirely normal to separate implant design from installation; those things take different skills and equipment.
I love when I am arguing with someone who I secretly agree with. I appreciate your response.
> A doctor doesnt put your individual wellbeing above their own
I think an example we could both agree on, would be something like...let's say you have several indicators that you might have a type of cancer. But the doctor will say, well let's not do a whole biopsy, because it's expensive and it's not covered by your insurance, and there's a low chance you have this cancer anyway. That might seem like a sensible conclusion to draw, but actually if we were simply caring for every person in a real way, like we would wish to be taken care of individually, we would do that biopsy anyway, because the alternative is death.
Now to draw a parallel to ancient tribes as I was doing earlier, the resources of the tribe dictates the care each tribe member can have. Okay. But we live in one of the most abundant eras in the history of the world. And, strikingly, we also have insane wealth inequality. So what I am positing here is that the default resource allocation for you is much lower than you might assume. People are going to make cost-cutting decisions that impact you greatly. And the only resort is for you is to manage your own health. Not that you SHOULDN'T manage your own health anyway, but this cost cutting resource allocation acts as a kind of betrayal. Things being "held together by duct-tape" is not the vision that children are raised with. We don't assume we are still in a period of being "left behind by the herd" because of how great everything is. But in fact, you will realize, when you see someone deny treatment for their advanced cancer due to finances and "the odds of survival" that in fact, you can be left behind by the herd. And the more you look into the way the healthcare system is structured, you realize that there really is no herd at all. At every step you are paying for help from someone who, in many instances, could care less.
What I am also saying is blatantly that these people make mistakes and sometimes do not care. And there is little recourse for that. Which isn't a point that you addressed, but anyway.
> Instead, they were conditional on good standing and mutual consent.
And this good standing has been converted to currency. Which is a much more isolated and cut throat version of good standing. In many ways it is more unfair. And what you don't realize as a kid is also how EXPENSIVE this "good standing" actually is. To receive the benefits of the technological state we purport to be in you usually have to be upper-class. The poor are often much closer to being completely alone. As if no society exists for them at all.
> Im saying their existence should not be taken for granted.
I, on the other hand, think that they don't go far enough. They aren't good enough. I'm actually not so sure what is being "taken for granted" in a for profit system, I pay every fucking dime of it. I am not impressed with its state.
>And this good standing has been converted to currency. Which is a much more isolated and cut throat version of good standing. In many ways it is more unfair. And what you don't realize as a kid is also how EXPENSIVE this "good standing" actually is. To receive the benefits of the technological state we purport to be in you usually have to be upper-class. The poor are often much closer to being completely alone. As if no society exists for them at all
I think this is a supper interesting observation, and a useful way for viewing this whole thing. At some point, people did rely on social currency and their personal memory of interactions to know if someone is "credit worthy".
I'm not sure that it was more "fair" than the hard numerical of financial currency, but I agree that social currencies could have been more forgiving. With social currency, you could go into debt with someone, and start fresh with someone new. The financial currencies, debt/assets follows people through their lives, and even across generations.
Yes, poor people are by parts of society who find they have little to offer. Poor people are free to associate with each other, but often have little use for eachother as well. This
>We don't assume we are still in a period of being "left behind by the herd" because of how great everything is. But in fact, you will realize, when you see someone deny treatment for their advanced cancer due to finances and "the odds of survival" that in fact, you can be left behind by the herd. And the more
I see how that could be jarring realization. If someone thought they had an equal ownership of social wealth, and equal say over the direction of the herd, it would be devastating to learn that it was all a lie at the last minute when it actually matters. I think many people were grifted by those who told them this would be the case, by people who were stating an aspiration as fact, and hoping that enough lies would make it true. Society has a little bit of compassion, but not nearly as much as some want and act as if it does. I do think it is sad and cruel that many people were indoctrinated with this false expectation. It set them up to live their lives thinking the world is a cruel and malicious place, when it is simply indifferent.
>I, on the other hand, think that they don't go far enough. They aren't good enough. I'm actually not so sure what is being "taken for granted" in a for profit system, I pay every fucking dime of it. I am not impressed with its state.
When I say "taken for granted", I mean the little compassion the society and the herd does have, and it is not guaranteed that it stay this way. In fact, it could very easily be much worse, and there are place with no compassion or welfare. There are places even worse than that, without decent rule of law, where being dangerous means you can take what you want or buy and sell humans for their commodity value.
Thats not to say that you cant want and advocate for something better than the current state. Im not sure what you mean by you pay for every dime of it. Is your ideal system one where you dont have to compensate others for what you take?
At the same time I would emphasize that people who offer any kind of advice online around life-threatening ailments do put down if they have a related degree, are currently practicing and are licensed in that or a very related field, or if they are conducting self experiments and sharing their results (with YMMV caveat to go along with it).
Reasons why should be obvious, but listening to podcasts, or reading pop-science books, connecting the dots and thinking you’re qualified to give, again, life-threatening advice, does not mean you’re actually qualified or you have an idea of how deep the rabbit hole goes (as we are learning, nobody really does).
Unfortunately, in my experience I encounter a lot of people who haven’t opened up an intro to biology book since their teenager days let alone an undergraduate biochem book, but they listen to podcasts and think they have it figured out and have the audacity to speak with confidence. I’ve been in situations where the practitioners are wincing but are too polite to call people out - it’s easier to let them just yap out what the podcast said and then change the topic. Don’t be one of these people.
I find communities that constantly add gratuitous "YMMV may vary - everyone's body is different and no one really knows anything" tend to have less groupthink and are generally more adaptable both to new research and old research. The "YMMV" should be obvious in any discussion about individual humans, but when communities don't emphasize it constantly, people start thinking that "90% of patients benefit from $INTERVENTION" somehow means that they should just shut down discussion around the other 10%.
I've realized similarly and by being "blessed" with very low-grade chronic conditions (family of diabetics, fatigue), I've created my own low grade insurance policy by creating lifestyle interventions in nutrition and exercise to maintain my health.
If I were to summarize the thousands of hours of what the Phd/MD health podcaster space has promoted, the jist of it comes down to:
- Get about 1 cup of 5 colors a day. Usually a smoothie is the way to achieve this. I make them in batches and they are conveniently available as grab and go.
- Prioritize sleep
- Exercise to improve v02 max as high as possible
I think _most_ of the population on hackernews has the financial privilege to implement the above 3 in various ways. But those will provide such a quality of life improvement to anyone dealing with chronic illness that it reduces the need for medicine a ton. And much of the damage from the environment can be mitigated by providing the body with the nutrition necessary to detoxify and deal with the various stresses they bring.
The way to look at modern medicine is that, modern medicine is very good at fast death scenarios. Heart attacks, randomly acute conditions, but they are terrible when it comes to slow death conditions like diabetes and dementia.
We need to look to rely on modern medicine for quick death, while creating interventions on the slow-death side ourselves, unfortunately.
It took me a long time to get to grips with the fact that you can't even take for granted that your own parents act in your best interest. We were all propagandized with love and kumbaya songs. In reality life is a lot more.. erm let's say self benefit driven with a lot of sprinkles of ego in it. People optimize their language output for their self benefit while actions don't really need to be aligned to get most of those self benefits.
agreed. I think we are at a unique time in history where the rose tinted glass can even exists. Where children can live sheltered in a low risk reality well into their 20's and then whiplash and disappointment and cynicism hits them like a ton of bricks.
I think that low baseline expectations is very important for mental health and general resilience.
When I was first diagnosed with T2 diabetes I was sent to a dietitian who handed me all kinds of pretty literature from the ADA about how great grains and pasta is for diabetics and food pyramids and “eat want you want in moderation and use insulin.”
After 5 years I decided that method was bullshit designed just to sell insulin. Went keto and was off insulin withn 2 months and haven’t had a drop of extraneous insulin since (7 years).
My doctors advised against me going keto because the ADA recommends their diet. When I explained I was going to try it anyway because it made sense that if my body was having trouble processing glucose, that eating a diet that minimized glucose would probably have a beneficial effect.
It was at that point that I realized that many doctors are simply following a treatment formula. Ultimately the ADA had to recognize that keto can be affective at managing diabetes. Yet, they still publish the pretty literature that advises type 2 diabetics to eat a diet that for them is significantly worse than a low carb diet.
While all that is true... the other part is that it's not like non-medical professionals are particularly good at knowing what they are talking about or acting in their own best interest either. In many cases, the institutional care is both horrible and better than what you'd get without it.
It took me a long time to get there, but I eventually did - I agree with every one of things that you listed. Fortunately, I have also learned that there are a whole lot of things that you can do to overcome each of those challenges. It does require a good bit of time to research, understand and apply them - as well as some luck.
Having experienced healthcare in multiple countries I can say most of the items on your list are pretty much universal, unfortunately. Skipping over the capitalistic and legal issues, which people more or less expect, I'd like to zoom in on your item #3. The fact that doctors are (often) clueless for complex diagnostics (not talking about a broken arm, etc.) is shocking to many people.
I think the two main factors driving this outcome are:
1. Due to the complexity of the problems they face and the quick diagnosis expected from them, medical professionals are taught to think in an expert system-like if-then statements. Some of these are rules of thumb, some may no longer apply due to latest research, and some may not be applicable to you.
2. Metabolisms may differ in important ways. A new doctor is trying to make a decision in a highly complicated high dimensional space with the few data points that you provide. This is OK, but they get too confident with their diagnosis.
I don't mind point one, and it can be improved in many ways. AI being a huge one.
Point two, though, is just an example of how preventive medicine is forgone due to its cost. The system doctor's use to share data could also stand massive improvements.
Regardless of how good AI clinical decision support models are, they're still garbage in / garbage out. The hard part of diagnosis is gathering all of the signs and symptoms that might potentially be relevant and AI can't help with that.
Cost is only one of several factors for forgoing preventive medicine. Many preventive services haven't been proven effective, or carry a risk of iatrogenic harm. And the healthcare system overall only has a limited capacity which is difficult to increase for a variety of complex reasons, so delivering preventive care to one patient may reducing access for other patients who already have medical conditions.
There are a limited set of preventive care services which most US health plans must cover at no cost to the patient because they have been proven to be net beneficial.
If you think that more preventive medicine should be covered then you can submit public comments to the task force responsible for writing the requirements.
If you think doctors can be overly stubborn to change once they've made an initial diagnosis .... you're going to be very unhappy with an AI diagnosis model. As one of many tools, I can see some value. But I'd hate if there was no way to at least try to convince an actual doctor that my issue might be something less expected.
One of the first things I did when GPT 3.5 came out was to give it some medical symptoms I had when I was a teenager that was wildly diagnosed by my primary care doctor that I finally (at least partially) figured out by doing my own research 10 years later.
It nailed what tests I should have done one the first try, one of which I still need to get done because my current primary care doctor doesn’t know how to run it and an endocrinologist straight up refused in the past. However, one of the other two tests suggested would have led to my quality of life improving to such a great extent I would be living a completely different life right now.
I had really, really bad fatigue and we had noticed my shoe size was shrinking as well. The doctor, who is now president of the clinic itself, diagnosed it as depression. The shoe size thing was explained as my arches maybe getting taller. As it turned out, I also lost 2 inches of height as well but I don’t know if we had noticed that at that point yet, but I’m willing to bet it was being charted.
You're likely as old as my kid, so I am sad to see this. Yes, take your health into your own hands. Medicate as little as possible - but this won't work for many people - in fact it could be dangerous. I am lucky to not have chronic conditions so I could afford not to believe my medical professional.
In my case - just to get the facts on Blood pressure took quite a bit of digging - thanks to some independent doctors who went against the grain and had a conscience and courage to dissent. Cholesterol is an even murkier pool. Its amazing how muddled the picture is.
Any idea how to remove the most common pollutants we run into everyday? I try to avoid high VOC materials and use charcoal filters for water. Kinda lazy to set up reverse osmosis system right now.
1) You're pretty much just screwed unless you're both very wealthy and make this topic your primary hobby/past-time. To really answer this you'd need to do an incredible amount of testing. Like buy 10 of everything you're considering and send off to labs for $100,000 of tests. Or install a million dollars of chemical air quality monitors in and around your home.
2) Large activated carbon air scrubbers. For air filtration you really need not just HEPA particulate filters, but robust VOC capture. The tiny bit of activated carbon in things like a Winix C535 or Coway Mega/AirMega really don't clean much. Instead, consider something like buying two 10"-12" carbon scrubbers from https://terra-bloom.com and get a matching size of their in-line "Silenced Ultra Quiet EC Fan". You can just stack these three items together and it forms a tall but not horribly ugly appliance that doesn't take up much floor space. You'd probably need to replace the filters once a year, and have quite a few around a normal-sized house, just like standalone HEPA filters (which you'd also probably still want as well).
3) Wash everything often - bedding, clothes, carpets, floors, walls, appliances, etc. Obviously, attempt to use a soap that won't add additional pollutants. Wash them twice, once with soap then again without soap.
4) Time. Assuming similar materials, something that is 5 years old should have already leeched out a lot of the chemicals which are going to off-gas/transfer/leech from it. So the polluting rate of something 5 years old that's been washed 50 times and already worn and broken in should be assumed to be lower than an identical, new, version of the same thing.
Outside of switching things up like using glass containers, enabling the body to detoxify itself and repair itself by ensuring that it gets adequate nutrition (daily) and exercise is the key.
But for a simple pill solution, consume sulfur. For as important as it is, it's not widely front of mind in the health space. So much focus on Vit D, Magnesium, Omega 3s, etc, which are all absolutely necessary.
Some great sources of pill based sulfur are Taurine, NAC, and MSM (methylsulfonylmethionine). My preference to recommend blindly as a general pill is MSM. But sulfur is key for the liver's detoxification functions to work ideally.
There's quotes flying around that say something like: 80% of the population (US or world) is deficient in X.
Usually X is omega 3's, Magnesium, Vit D, and also to add to the list, Sulfur is a huge one. Outside of being in a culture like Koreans that consume cruciferous veggies 3x/day (via kimchi), most americans only get it from meat, garlic, onions and broccoli. If one has brittle nails or hair doesn't grow as quickly, that would be the sign that something like MSM in pill form would be helpful. Otherwise, folks are probably fine if they are consuming daily amounts of anything containing sulfur.
And this makes for a pretty lonely and downright harmful society, when viewed through that lens.
And I'm not going to feel stupid or naive for feeling like children are tricked into believing the opposite is true.
I want to also say, this state that everyone is acting in their self interest is not something we should promote, or be proud of, or assume is the natural state of things. It is a state that we are being forced into, and we are being convinced to accept.
People as individuals are actually very good. And if we were to get over a few little logical fallacies, we could extend that goodness onto our whole society. But there are many reasons why that is considered harmful by some in power, and then many more who are propagandized into agreeing with them.
Being good and working in your own self interest aren't mutually exclusive though. In fact most of good things are genuinely done out of complete self interest, and practically all good things on the corporate or bureaucratic level. There's always someone involved in the decision who directly benefits, luckily sometimes it's all/most of us too. Society gets better when the self interested goals of an individual are aligned best with the majority of people (e.g. why presidents are on average better than kings).
To give a very active example, Zuckerberg isn't throwing billions into making ML models and then giving them out for free out of some sense of cosmic right, he's doing so to eliminate competition and further Meta's goals of making more money. But since his actions align with what most of us want, i.e. open source models, it's all seen as a relatively good thing. There is no such thing as "objective good" in nature, there's just how actions influence the person doing the moralizing.
Every living being on earth is hardwired to do two things first and foremost: survive, and make sure its species survives. The ones that weren't are simply no longer around. Helping others is ultimately something you do out of self interest, since you benefit from it indirectly. It is absolutely the natural state of things.
> Being good and working in your own self interest aren't mutually exclusive though.
Being good and selfish/doing whatever is in your own self interest no matter who else gets hurt are mutually exclusive. The reason we can't trust the food we eat is because companies are selfish and don't care that you get sick. They'll feed you poison because even though they already have billions in profits, it makes them a few extra cents every time they do. That's where we're at, and allowing it to continue isn't the natural state of things.
A company only cares about money, always have, always will. The way you make them care about their actions is by taking away their money, it's all pretty simple.
The monetary damage from bad PR when caught clearly isn't enough, but when you have regulators like the EU who impose massive fines as a percentage of gross revenue, suddenly every company becomes super careful about what they do. And those regulations are there because it's in the selfish self interest of the electorate to not get poisoned :)
We don't live in the natural world, we bend it to our will. By recognizing what's the default we can leverage that to improve on it more effectively. If you know a bad person will do bad things, you can plan for it and make sure nobody gets hurt. Pretending a bad man isn't bad is just optimistic delusion and why libertarianism doesn't work in real life.
Children aren't tricked into believing it because it's actually true. As you point out, people are inherently good, and they act against their self-interest all the time. It's always a mistake though. ;D
It's important to separate objective self interest (knowing all the facts combined with perfect reasoning) and subjective self interest (based on limited and likely misleading data, with possibly faulty reasoning). The first one will obviously not be true for the most part and is usually only knowable in retrospect, but aside from some amount of purely random decisions, the rest will largely fall in the second group, if only subconsciously. But I'd argue it's still the same exact principle :P
Quite right, even the broader philosophical definition of "cynicism rejects all conventional desires for wealth, power, glory, social recognition, conformity" fits perfectly with my views. I am a cynic in every sense of the word :)
This is naked political activism that clearly breaks the HN guidelines and offers zero informational content, intellectual gratification, or other value to me or anyone else here. Please don't put stuff like this on HN.
> I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad.
> So I am not surprised to see this, and expect to see more of it.
This is political. You are extremely clearly dog-whistling to the "government needs to reform healthcare" and "America bad" groups. Precisely zero people use this kind of hyper-charged, content-less language without a political agenda.
The long list of statements carefully chosen to maximize emotion with minimal information transfer, followed by
> I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad.
> So I am not surprised to see this, and expect to see more of it.
...which is a clearly political call for "someone to do something", using extremely emotionally charged language with zero (negative?) utility such as "pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just".
Like, it behooves one to know enough about one's car or house or computer in order to not get scammed/idiot-screwed by mechanics and contractors and tech support
It would be surprising if one's body were different. The general level of faith there seems inconsistent with reality
- That your medical professionals are acting in your best interest
- That your insurance company is acting in your best interest
- That your medical professional knows what they are talking about
- That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you
- That the legal level of pollutants in the water, air, ground, walls, floors, etc are actually safe or even being measured properly
- That you aren't being subjected to something that later will be found to be unhealthy, even if it is currently known, until it is litigated in retrospect
- That you can afford the treatment that would be necessary to make yourself healthy
- That anyone in the industries that would normally protect you (healthcare, insurance, public health, government, etc) even care to do so
I understand that some people would look at that list and say I should have never expected some of those, but pardon me for being propagandized at a very young age that we lived in a country that was good and just. That's my bad.
So I am not surprised to see this, and expect to see more of it.