Some people just don’t react to it while others do.
I had hay fever as a kid which developed into asthma in my 30s, I had immune therapy from a specialist who gave me increasingly concentrated shots of allergens weekly for years. After a while my asthma went into remission and I quit taking medicine for it. I still have hay fever symptoms some times but they aren’t too bad and I rarely medicate for them because I get side effects even from some of the “non-drowsy” antihistamines.
Even though it is done under medical supervision, it is a controversial treatment. It’s banned in the U.K. They’d have me sit around the office for 30 minutes in case I had a bad reaction which they could usually treat with an injection of epinephrine but could be lethal if somebody was really unlucky.
Note there is at least one report of treatment of poison ivy sensitivity this way
The thing is I got a treatment from my doc which was somewhat evidence based, compare that to all the bizzaro ideas circulating such as Edgar Cayce’s idea that you could treat hay fever with an alcohol tincture of ragweed. (Got that from a herbalist once, it does seem harmless)
I've heard of this desensitization stuff before too. For all the mixed reviews of it, maybe success simply depends on individual factors that nobody has identified yet.
Yes, this is known to be true. Studies of oral immunotherapy often show failure rates in the 20-30% range, and nobody knows a way to accurately predict who will succeed and who will fail without actually going through the whole treatment. IgE levels can correlate with success but they are far from a perfect predictor. The other big factor is age. If you can start immunotherapy super early, like in the 0-2 year old range, it is significantly more likely to work.
Jus fyi but the "non drowsy" antihistamines are fundamentally different or anything, they're just the same type of drowsy antihistamine but with the dose lowered so it barely works unless you take more than one, thereby making it drowsy again
This is incorrect enough as to be dangerous (IMPE, I am not a doctor). They are non-drowsy because they do not cross the blood brain barrier effectively as I understand. Second and third generation antihistamines are fantastic.
While I agree with your comment, for some peoples non-drowsy antihistamines are a myth.
I must be overly sensitive or have a deficient BBB because 10 mg loratadine transform me into a lethargic zombie for about 48 hours while providing minimal relief. A double dose of vyvaanse and a few coffees are not enough to bring me out of that state.
I had brain zaps with Zyrtec (Cetirizine) that took me a while to recognize for what they were because I thought they were related to other meds I was taking. I find Allegra (Fexofenadine) agrees with me a lot better. Personally I hate Claritin (Loratadine) as it definitely makes me depressed.
Experience with those others makes me wary of using Allegra except when my allergy symptoms are really bad.
BTW: Benadryl (Diphenhydramine), which has the same ingredient in the same dose marketed as a sleep aid, is really good for Poison Ivy because of its ability to penetrate into tissues really well. 30 years ago you would get a prescription for a round of steroid pills that will have you feeling pretty messed up for a week if you got Poison Ivy but today you are likely to be told to go to the pharmacy and treat yourself with OTC pills. Poison Ivy is bad enough that most people will take the drowsiness.
This isn't true. H1 antagonists, which is the group of drugs commonly referred to as antihistamines, contains two subgroups of pharmaceuticals. There are the first generation antihistamines, which are generally more popular and earn the reputation of making you drowsy, and the second generation antihistamines. The second generation antihistamines are significantly more selective for the H1 receptors you want to block versus the ones in your brain. Doxylamine is a first generation drug marketed under the brand name Unisom for insomnia, whereas a common second generation antihistamine loratadine commonly includes the phrase "non-drowsy" on the box. It still increases sedation, but at a substantially lower rate than the first generation drugs.
This sounds very much like something that someone might hear on Joe Rogan's podcast and think it's a good idea because someone who knows how to put two sentences together sounded like they knew what they were talking about.
Gradual exposure to allergens like urushiol has been a legitimate recognized treatment plan for decades. Animals are able to eat poison ivy and poison oak. It's a brave strategy to eat the stuff, but nobody including smug netizens like yourself knows if it will work for someone else. Everything that works in medicine was probably thought to be ridiculous by someone at one point.
Joe Rogan isn't the best source of medical advice, but he has been smeared by the media on behalf of big pharma. His approach to treating COVID came from a doctor and was not "horse paste"... CNN was proven to have edited video of Joe Rogan to make his skin look off-color. Also, never forget that the mainstream media said the "vaccines" would stop transmission of the virus when all the experts knew it wouldn't do so, from the start. They also lied about side effects.
Pointing out that at some points Joe Rogan might have been smeared unjustly by mainstream media does not in any way come close to absolving the crimes JR has committed against modern science by giving constant airtime to outright quacks. Anyone remotely interested in making sure proper science knowledge and education makes it out to gen pop should be completely against Rogan and everything he stands for. It only takes one to ruin your reputation. Rogan has aired hundreds. It’s even more dangerous than one might think because sometimes, like in some examples you reference, there is some legitimate medicine mixed in.
Science doesn't work like that, religion does. "Science" harmed itself with some people and an ideology heavily censoring opponents, and by shutting down any debate, including scientific one.
The very idea that one can commit "crimes" against science by discussing ideas (however false) is shameful. As you said, it's no different than religious accusations of heresy. It's truly disheartening to see a backwards and illiberal idea like that being promoted here.
Science is not conducted through public debate. Full stop. There's a reason why it's peer review, and not talk show host review.
During COVID, most everybody was operating from an incomplete data set. Public officials were wrong about some things. You can choose to see this as a conspiracy set up by big pharma, or you can see it as imperfect people doing what they could to mitigate a public health crisis.
And yes, critique the peer review process all you want. It's flawed in many ways. But this "it's us versus science" narrative is extremely, insidiously damaging to society at large. It only serves powerful people who benefit from whipping an audience into a frenzy to buy their shitty supplements or bumper stickers or whatever.
The scientific principle is based on proving thing by experimentation.
it is empirical that means that you should be able to re-produce the results of a thing or assertion by following the details in a paper.
The public might be able to do it themselves. But the point is, its not about who says what, its about can it be reproduced.
scientist "A" says that the sky is blue because of "x". devises an experiment to prove that. writes up the experiment, publishes it, asserts that the sky is blue because of x, and that the experiment proves this.
Scientist "B" says it bollocks, reproduces the experiment, but also extends the experiment to show that the data also says that the sky is green. Paper is published with data and method.
The process repeats until a consensus is reached where everyone can reproduce the data, and no one can disprove the hypothesis that the sky is blue because of x.
None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
During the pandemic, though, we had scientists asserting that various physical methods would stop the spread of the virus with no evidence to back that up (masking, keeping 6 ft away from people, previous COVID did not provide immunity, vaccines would stop the spread of COVID, etc etc).
When scientists don't follow their own method, how should the public decide on which findings to trust?
>The scientific principle is based on proving thing by experimentation.
As documented in Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" there are periods where little progress is made because scientists get tunnel vision. It takes someone to come along and push things in a different direction, perhaps to the detriment of people with decades or lots of money sunk into a different orthodoxy, and navigating that turmoil can be challenging.
Who do you think decides which research gets funded, or published? If you go too far outside of what's acceptable to the establishment, your career is over. When there are billions of dollars on the line and your opposition can literally fund a dozen studies to "discredit" your take, it doesn't matter if your results can be reproduced or not. It could be many years before the truth comes out, if it ever does.
>None of that requires asserting bollocks on a chat show. Sure science outreach is great, but its not _really_ part of the method.
If you want to get funding for research then sometimes it is necessary to engage the public. If you hope to buck the well-monied establishment with hot takes, you might even need legal support. Besides that it's just interesting to hear what people are working on. I think people like to know what scientists think, and it gets boring to hear just a single opinion about things nonstop.
Actually, peer review journals are public debate. The much-applauded "consensus" is essentially voting. If you follow the money you will quickly see the connection between science and politics, both internally and with the public at large.
I am biased against anyone who wants to stop me or others from thinking lol. Yes, "peer review" means something. It means that the criteria to get published is that some approved reviewers must accept the results. No more, no less. Anyone can obtain a journal article and form their own opinion about the article and its authors. This includes members of other academic fields, or the general public. Sometimes this outside scrutiny is sorely needed to address problems in the research.
If one has good results and data, their academic pedigree theoretically shouldn't matter when it comes to publication. But we know it doesn't work like that generally. The real world does not live up to our lofty ideals.
This is the most anti-science attitude I think I've seen in a very long time. It's also foolish and dangerous IMHO, because it greatly contributes to the very thing you want to prevent: amplification and creation of quack science to the gen pop.
Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away. It fuels conspiracy theories such as about how big pharma is censoring ideas about natural (or already highly-available) treatments in order to make billions on devoloping their vaccines and using government levers to force people to buy them. (They did try to do that too, though they got lucky in that none of the "natural" treatments seemed to really work. But had they worked, their reaction would have been the same.)
It also means the discussions people see are going to happen on shows/forums/podcasts where the host doesn't push back on them and offer challenges and critical thinking. This not only sets a terrible example for people by demonstrating through social proof that one should accept these things uncritically, but it makes it appear as though the case is very strong and there isn't a good counter-argument! This double effect makes a strong impression on people in the exact opposite way that we want.
I think Joe Rogan has done more to bring sanity to these things than most people. Have you ever watched those episodes? He is very conversational but if there is ever a claim that doesn't seem supported, he will ask Jamie (his assistant or producer or whatever) look it up, and they are highly skeptical and choosy of sources.
We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work. We're no longer living in the society where the average person only gets information from TV or books available at their library or local book store. If there's a quack theory out there, it will get to people through the internet. The answer is not to shut down the internet. We need to expose these ideas and defeat them using logical and scientific refutation, and we need to encourage and teach critical thinking skills. This is a new world we are living in, and the tried and true techniques or censoring and book burning do not work anymore. Embrace it and use it.
> Simply depriving these people of airtime does NOT quash their views and make them go away.
> We should know by now that censoring information these days does not work
This argument (repeated) is a bit of a red herring. I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever. We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
> It fuels conspiracy theories
This is kind of a corollary to the above point: People are going to theorize conspiracies no matter what. There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
>I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever.
You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis. These same people are the biggest liars around.
>We're just questioning the wisdom of embracing and amplifying it to reach people it wouldn't have before.
"You can have free speech as long as you only speak quietly in your own closet." The power to curate information or "amplify" it as you say is practically very hard to distinguish from censorship when you choose to show only things you agree with, or show only the worst straw men for the other side.
>There are undoubtedly conspiracy theorists who think the exact opposite: that including pseudoscience is a conspiracy to make people think it isn't being censored in other ways.
There are some "conspiracy theories" designed to discredit anyone who is skeptical of authority. The people who complain the most about conspiracy theories really just want people to stop thinking independently, and start accepting whatever their establishment says.
>Thus, that a given action might strengthen or weaken the conspiracy theories of at least 1 pseudoscientist isn't enough to justify doing the action or not. Neither choice will make conspiracy theories go away.
Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
> "You can have free speech as long as you only speak quietly in your own closet." The power to curate information or "amplify" it as you say is practically very hard to distinguish from censorship when you choose to show only things you agree with, or show only the worst straw men for the other side.
No platform owes you the right to amplify nonsense. The government can’t make you stop, but individual platforms or individuals themselves? They’re free to do whatever, just like you. Don’t like it? Start a Truth Social and go yell at your adoring fans all you want.
> Conspiring to suppress conspiracy theories sure won't make them stop. Being right and showing positive results to the contrary is what wins the day.
While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
>No platform owes you the right to amplify nonsense. The government can’t make you stop, but individual platforms or individuals themselves? They’re free to do whatever, just like you. Don’t like it? Start a Truth Social and go yell at your adoring fans all you want.
Governments of the world, including the US government, have repeatedly been shown to order these "private" platforms around. So this argument is cooked.
>While that’s a cute thought, conspiracy theorists are exceptionally good at one thing: theorizing conspiracies. “Being right” doesn’t happen, ever, because any positive results can simply be walked back as “part of another conspiracy.”
You should ask yourself why conspiracy theories make more sense to people than "the truth". Hint: It's because real conspiracies are commonfare.
>The way you kill conspiracy theories is not amplifying them as truth. That’s it.
Again this "not amplifying" is code for "censoring" or "burying". The truth inevitably shines through, even when it comes to this bullshit. You think the reality of censorship is a conspiracy, yet people have been censored heavily in this country for years now at the behest of the US government and some NGOs. Sometimes for strictly political reasons. You can call me a crackpot if you want but I've seen the censorship itself and the evidence of government involvement.
Who, pray tell, is qualified to judge what is worthy of "not amplifying"? That word makes me cringe every time because it was chosen to sound innocuous and appealing to young people. It is pure doublespeak.
Liberals even 10-15 years ago knew better than to argue for censorship. Now the left can't stop singing the praises of censorship, keep trying to redefine words to suit the agenda, and basically dragged the political dialogue into dangerous territory that was conclusively settled hundreds of years ago by brilliant philosophers.
> You should ask yourself why conspiracy theories make more sense to people than the truth
While conspiracy theorists believe this to be the case, and they are people, they're a slightly-vocal minority, and thus it'd be disingenuous to represent what conspiracy theorists think as what "people" think, unless you clarify that you're using the term "people" to refer to 1+ persons, not any indicative majority.
As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
>> I haven't seen anyone saying we can make pseudoscience go away forever.
> You must not have been looking. There are government and media officials coming out against "mis-, dis-, and mal-information" on a constant basis.*
This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
>While conspiracy theorists believe this to be the case, and they are people, they're a slightly-vocal minority, and thus it'd be disingenuous to represent what conspiracy theorists think as what "people" think, unless you clarify that you're using the term "people" to refer to 1+ persons, not any indicative majority.
Conspiracy theorists are everywhere. Just casually mention price fixing and you'll see endless speculation from just about everyone about how "they're out to get you". Mention politicians and lobbyists and they will readily speculate about who is on the take, based on stupid shit like physical traits of a person. These same people will then cry about a bunch of other conspiracy theories that don't jive with their preconceived notions.
>As you and I both said upthread: there will always be greater than zero pseudoscience conspiracy theorists who view literally anything as confirmation of the conspiracy theory.
This is true. Likewise, many "normies" regard the existence of nutty conspiracy theorists as evidence that any speculation about possible conspiracies is evidence of stupidity or even insanity.
>This is not evidence that they, or any significant amount of people, have said they can make conspiracy theories and pseudoscience go away forever. There's nothing wrong with "coming out against" disinformation.
First of all I didn't say that. Second of all, there is a lot wrong with trying to police speech, especially under the pretense of it being "disinformation". If you care about disinformation then you put out good information only, engage in debates, and so on. Basically stop treating your fellow citizens like children for merely disagreeing. Even if we want to suppress untrue information, it is extremely difficult to be 100% sure what is true, and the intellectual and popular discourse requires free expression of controversial ideas. If you don't want to have your worldview challenged, there are many ways to tune out the stuff you don't care for. The problem we have is that the authoritarians are threatened by the fact that someone out in the world disagrees with them. They can't handle that because their egos are too fragile. (Of course, some authoritarians do not care about the ideas at all. They just want power and the ideas are the tool they use to get it. We have this type in the West too.)
This is just a variant of “both sides” argument. Both sides are not equal. There will be conspiracy theorists and quacks always, no matter what you do. It’s when you give them a microphone and any semblance of legitimacy that it becomes dangerous. Case in point: Alex Jones. The correct thing is to dismiss these people outright. It’s already been demonstrated that if you try to have a public discourse on this kind of stuff that bad actors will just come in and sow misinformation. Attempting to have such discourse merely elevates the legitimacy of the quack’s claims, since you can have the most detailed of detailed takedowns but be countered with literal word salad nonsense and still “lose” in the eyes of gen pop. The quack has everything to gain, because by getting into a discussion with someone legitimately qualified in a public arena they are placed on somewhat equal levels with that person in the eyes of the public. A standing in society they absolutely do not deserve.
By the way, Rogan himself has a few entries on Quackwatch for promoting questionable supplements that he has a financial interest in. So he’s not, as you imply and he would love to have you believe “just asking questions”. He is actively engaged in the same bullshit his quack guests come on and peddle.
Ivermectin does nothing. Linking to a site that uses fraudulent research in order to prove an incorrect point does not help your position. There were places in the world that widely distributed Ivermectin as an experimental treatment (such as Brazil) whose health agencies have now, after the fact, said that Ivermectin does not help. You are peddling fraud.
I will not engage with you further and simply refer you to [1], which includes some of the studies used in your fraudulent website. And the data has only gotten more damning since 2021.
It's not a fraudulent website. I'm familiar with the blog you linked to and frankly I think it's run by a bunch of snobby conformists who pose as free-thinkers. Therefore, I don't expect much. But I may look over the post when I get time. Thanks for trying, I know what I asked is a lot of work. It's just not as clear-cut as you think, and it certainly wasn't at the time everyone came out against it.
Just look at the low depths the media went to in order to smear Ivermectin, a Nobel-prize winning drug for humans with minimal side effects, and that should tell you there is more to it than we were officially told. As I said before, they literally tried to connect the Joe Rogan thing to horse Ivermectin, and fabricated a hoax about an ER not treating gunshot victims because of people falling ill with the veterinary stuff. Meanwhile in Africa, people routinely take inexpensive Ivermectin that they buy with great ease. It all sounds fishy. I can't ignore the official lies, even if I do find some research that claims no benefit is there.
If you dig into this stuff more, you'll find that pharmaceutical companies fund studies to cast doubt on established medicines that they can't make money on, such as those with expired patents. If there was a simple silver bullet solution to covid and big pharma couldn't monetize it, they would surely bury the results. The huge investments in vaccines could not be allowed to fail, as many elites were heavily invested in the producers of those vaccines.
> Authorities were told from the top to not prescribe it
They were also told not to prescribe Metamizole, because it kills people. there is no controversy there (well apart from spain who still have it on license.)
> How about the fact it killed some people within minutes?
> The dictionary even changed the definition of "vaccine"
Which dictionary? Also, bear in mind that the dictionary isn't static. Its updated to reflect how english is spoken now, by the public.
> In the years since the vaccine came out, many young people have suspiciously dropped dead or at least lost consciousness on live TV
Do you have data for that? what does it corrolate to? also depending on the country, some places its the younger that have less uptake.
Do you know how hard it is to run a project with 10 people?
Do you know how exponentially harder it is to run it for 1000 people? How on earth, looking at how shit the US government is at functioning, can they organise something like that?
Moreover, if its the "MSM", who are holding the secrets, do you know how fucking chatty those pricks are? (I used to work for a finance newspaper) All you have to do is take them to the pub and you can find out who's doing what illegal shit. or whos flogging synthetic opioids to the rust belt
If you don't know what I'm talking about don't make shit up. This was a court proceeding in the US. Yes, people had to sue to get the trial data and again separately to get VAERS data. I forgot which one was supposed to be delayed 75 years (the original Pfizer trial I think) but in any case I remember the judge thought it unreasonable. In the end it was released. The list of possible side effects is huge and includes just about everything you can think of, perhaps by design.
>Which dictionary? Also, bear in mind that the dictionary isn't static. Its updated to reflect how english is spoken now, by the public.
You can google this easily. As for changing the definition, this vaccine didn't even stop death or infection as claimed. It at best "reduced" bad outcomes and that is negligible at best.
>Do you have data for that? what does it corrolate to? also depending on the country, some places its the younger that have less uptake.
No because this data is suppressed and never accurately reported. I think the CDC to this day hasn't made separate categories for "death/hospitalization with covid" and "death/hospitalization because of covid". Even when there is an incident, it's blamed on something else or even covid, because the vaccine does not prevent infection. At one point deaths among the vaccinated eclipsed deaths of unvaccinated, because of how many people were vaccinated (if nothing else).
>Do you know how exponentially harder it is to run it for 1000 people? How on earth, looking at how shit the US government is at functioning, can they organise something like that?
First of all, the truth has largely come out about all the major alleged conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theorists were right about: the lab leak, biowarfare research, gain of function research, Fauci lying and intimidating his subordinates to suppress the truth, and the fact that the vaccines don't stop the spread of covid or even slow it. They were also right about side effects and attempted suppression of trial and VAERS data.
Second of all, are you suggesting it is impossible for a large group to conspire to do something, or that crimes can be ongoing even as the public is aware of it? All they have to do to shut it down is call you names and censor you, get you fired, and so on. This has happened to people over the vaccine vs. their basic human rights, don't forget.
If all that needed to be done to halt crimes of that scale is make them public, we would not live under the constant state surveillance that we do today, because Snowden exposed all that.
>Moreover, if its the "MSM", who are holding the secrets, do you know how fucking chatty those pricks are? (I used to work for a finance newspaper) All you have to do is take them to the pub and you can find out who's doing what illegal shit. or whos flogging synthetic opioids to the rust belt
I don't have this personal experience but there have been whistleblowers and even hidden camera exposés on a lot of this shit. James O'Keefe had a big undercover interview with a Pfizer employee, and not long after the board of his nonprofit went rogue and sunk the whole thing. He is still fighting them in court. No doubt they were all bought by Big Pharma or something, because it makes no sense otherwise.
Look at the Boeing situation. 2 whistleblowers dead within weeks of each other, and 10 more living in fear. And that's not even the government or the richest company around. Even though Boeing has been exposed, they haven't made any major changes yet.
Is there any research out there which links moderate amounts of vitamin D (such as the recommended dosages on vitamin D supplements) to any negative effects at all?
Is there any research to indicate that a lack of urushiol has negative effects, similar to how we know that a lack of vitamin D has negative effects?
It's not a prescription drug, so I'm not really sure what 'self-medication' means; I self-medicate with caffeine, might eat an orange and self-medicate vit C later, etc.
NHS (UK) guidance:
> Government advice is that everyone should consider taking a daily vitamin D supplement during the autumn and winter.
> People at high risk of not getting enough vitamin D, all children aged 1 to 4, and all babies (unless they're having more than 500ml of infant formula a day) should take a daily supplement throughout the year.
(People at high risk = for example darker skin, or indoor jobs.)
Vitamin D deficiency (and while we're at it, B12 deficiency and iron deficiency) are real deficiency issues that have risen in numbers across Western societies for quite the time now - IIRC, a large contributor is our change in diets and living habits.
Basically, we're spending far less time working out in the open so our body doesn't generate vitamin D on its own in sufficient quantities, and the trend towards highly processed, nutritionally inflexible diets on one side and vegetarianism/veganism on the other side leads to a whole host of malnutrition issues.
Unfortunately, the "malnutrition" levels in bloodwork are mostly calibrated on white European males... so similar to BMI [1] and a few medications and diseases [2], there is a "vitamin D paradox" in Black people who seem to not be that sensitive to lower vit-D levels than White people [3].
Human bodies and genetics are fascinating, even if you're not an expert in it.
There is lots of research saying that vitamin D deficiency causes problems, and the deficiency is more common than you'd expect. Other health conditions and habits can lead to a deficiency.
There is fixing deficiency and then there is "hyper dozing". Also lot of it is seasonal, northern hemisphere is entering summer so there should be plenty of sun light even with short exposure to light.
I don't think exposure to light is enough to overcome an actual deficiency. When you're exposed to light you get kind of a huge dose, until you get a tan. Then your skin won't produce much more for a while.
You're right about overdoing it. There is such a thing as vitamin D poisioning. I think it draws calcium out of your bones or something. On the other hand, not enough vitamin D is bad for your bones too.
Fortunately, there are tests for vitamin D. If you think you have a problem with it, you ought to get a test.
