How to NOT be Mr. Bromism
So This Guy Had Bromism is my last post on this site. He studied nutrition and asked AI a question about salt and it said the sodium part of sodium chloride is a problem and you CAN safely substitute bromide for purposes of cleaning.
He apparently overlooked that minor little detail and thought he was educated enough to use it as a dietary substitute and it went badly. In biology, bromide promotes mental symptoms and he was soon imagining his neighbor was poisoning him blah blah blah.
So how do you safely DIY it?
I've had ONE high school chemistry class. If you are going to DIY medical stuff, accept that you will be looking up scientific words and you need to look up the chemical formula of stuff. He should have started with further investigating bromide and sodium and sodium chloride and known biological effects.
Don't ask AI or read a SINGLE post on the Internet -- even by ME, even if you think I'm Wile E. Coyote, SUPER genius -- and then go off half cocked. I routinely point to other things I've written and recommend reading that other stuff before DOING anything.
I've had some instruction in Greek and Latin and that helps make me comfortable deconstructing scientific words. But if you go on this EDventure, just keep looking it up and rereading it until YOUR brain goes "Oh, I know what that means."
You WILL need to learn some basics about chemistry and biology to understand nutrition and health. How much? It depends on how much you ALREADY know and WHAT issue you are trying to figure out.
I have a diagnosis of atypical Cystic Fibrosis and THIS is the process I used to solve CF:
1. Collect concepts that firsthand experience plus appropriate science say meet a high confidence threshold for being true or accurate or meaningful.2. Toss them in a mental box.3. Over time, work out THIS is RELATED to THAT.4. Determine some concept of HOW they relate.5. MAGIC!
So let's expand a little on those points:
1. Collect concepts that firsthand experience plus appropriate science say meet a high confidence threshold for being true/accurate/meaningful.
I'm not sure what word I want there. You need to feel confident it's something real or very close to real and accurate even though it's like a single thread in a garment and you can't see all of it. But it's a THING to start with that seems important to you even knowing it's half-baked at this point.
Confidence: That's a technical term in statistics. It's a test of how strongly you can support your conclusion with hard data. It doesn't mean "I feel GOOD! (Insert dance music here)"
Learn something about studies and how they get done. Not all studies are equally useful and you need to have some idea of how to find science that passes the sniff test and doesn't make you laugh.
Here's a piece by me called DNA and Eye Color and Lies. It links back to a piece by me called The Problem with Abstracts.
Contrary to the obnoxious Internet meme that "The plural of anecdote is not data." it actually is. That's EXACTLY how a lot of scientific studies get done: SCIENTISTS go ASK people for their STORY and they write it down and then when you have enough ANECDOTES you have DATA.
Those are often not great studies, by the way. That's exactly how most studies on nutrition and human sexuality get done and then we wonder why we have stupid ideas.
However, that doesn't mean anecdotal evidence is useless. I relied heavily on anecdotal evidence from comments on CF lists to check my ideas while trying to figure out what in the heck is going on.
However, be mindful lots of people are full of crap and have an agenda, so consider the source.
There's a woman in CF land who smokes and whose son with CF died at age seventeen. She was actively hostile to me and my goals.
Similarly:
All of the above links boil down to how to have statistical confidence in your anecdotal data. Or keep in mind that the TV show House was tentatively called "Everybody lies." and try to figure out why someone might be spouting BULLSHIT.
I mostly didn't ask questions on CF lists and instead just listened to conversation such that I had reason to believe they were saying something true or that they believed to be true or their best understanding of the truth as they were experiencing it.
2. Toss these bits and pieces of high confidence in a mental box.
Just keep them in mind anytime you are looking at the problem in question as a kind of set of first principles to begin checking things against. If you have worked out "Z is high" and you are talking to someone nattering on about "Z is so low!" you maybe don't want to waste too much of your time on this fool.
3. Over time, work out THIS is RELATED to THAT.
Let them sit together and see which two or three things keep showing up at the same time over and over.
4. Once you are confident they are related, determine some concept of HOW they relate.
You are sort of trying to put together a mathematical formula. So you have x and y and z and a and b and c and once you know x and y and z show up together, you are trying to find the other pieces of your equation, like "Is that x PLUS y?" Or "Is that x THEN y?"
You want a concept there of like does one lead to the other or do they just coincide which may imply they are both caused by some underlying other factor or factors you may not have identified yet. After you have enough pieces of high confidence and start identifying HOW they relate, you can start predicting and inferring a lot more.
5. If you get your formula worked out: MAGIC! You get to do the impossible and fix the unfixable.
Case Study
I have a form of Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and the current mental model for it is that people with CF (pwcf) overproduce mucus and we are drowning in our own mucus.
It's a retarded idea. It's scientifically unsound and doesn't hold water or follow basic logic of what we know about how biology works because mucus is a protective coating that helps keep germs out.
So our current OFFICIAL medical dogma for CF is:
You are DYING of lung infections at a stupidly young age because you make too much protective coating for your lungs.
But remember step one is high degree of confidence both scientifically and based on firsthand experience. So check that against reality.
I found one study years ago that said "PWCF under produce mucus." Guess what? I had more problems on days when my sinuses were too dry.
So that checks out.
I no longer have the link to the study and it's probably no longer available. PWCF used to ask me regularly for that study.
So MY firsthand experience SAYS I'm sicker when I have LESS mucus production. So I paid attention to what people on CF lists talked about that might cast light on how is it everyone buys this BULLSHIT that we overproduce mucus if we really produce too little?
This is where it helps to read up on biology and establish some general understanding of some stuff because the key detail that made it all fall into place was a couple of discussions about CF RUINING the sex lives of women with CF because it causes vaginal dryness that occurred in the context of other discussions about women with CF trending towards "being goopy down there" and having lots of vaginal yeast infections etc.
So in other words, the goopiness down there isn't overproduction of MUCUS. If it were, what you would hear is "I pay my medical bills via prostitution and have no problem handling ten or more men a day because I'm ALWAYS wet!"
So general information here: CF is best known to the general public as a lung condition but is well understood in the CF community as significantly impacting gut function and both of those systems are coated in mucus. But female genitals are also mucus membranes.
So how is it you have a global miscoding of all mucus membranes and your lungs overproduce mucus while your girl parts are too dry to HAVE a sex life?
You don't. The goopiness down there is not mucus. It's drainage from infection.
Ditto the crap gunking up your lungs and interfering with breathing that we cough up. It's NOT mucus. It's phlegm.
There's more moving parts than that to my understanding of CF and this isn't really intended to be about CF. You can apply this to my high blood pressure hypothesis for Black Americans and YOU should START by looking up my basic CLAIMS, such as:
1. Pork is high in selenium.
2. If you eat pork regularly, you probably have selenium poisoning.
3. Selenium is a metal or metalloid, ergo selenium poisoning is a form of metal poisoning and will have myriad knock on effects.
4. Selenium is known to raise blood pressure.
5. Salt should help bring down selenium levels.
6. It's probably fundamentally wrong that Black Americans generally eat too much salt in part because they are generally more likely to have physical jobs than your typical White desk jockey, so they SWEAT and people who SWEAT lose salt. That's why we have drinks like Gatorade, which comes from giving salted drinks to football players. Florida Gators is probably the team that's named for.
AND THEN start a GODDAMNED JOURNAL and check if YOUR firsthand experience MATCHES the hypothesis in addition to the science matching the claims the hypothesis is based upon. Does YOUR blood pressure go up when you eat pork or other high selenium foods and down when you suck down the salt?
I'm not Black. Well, not VIEWED as Black though it's possible I fail the Southern White Supremacy one drop rule.
And I don't have high blood pressure. For ME, this is a thought experiment because I write about medical stuff and I am hypercritical of a lot of social stuff.
If, for YOU, this is more serious than running your big fat opinionated mouth on the Internet and may have extremely significant health and welfare consequences -- including life and death itself -- don't just buy my bullshit. CHECK everything I SAY for yourself against both solid scientific sources and your firsthand lived experience.
And IF and ONLY IF my hypothesis holds water after you rigorously fact check, THEN you can safely DIY some dietary tweaks to begin getting your blood pressure under control and getting off the blood pressure medication.
This process of solving for X generalizes and I'm currently applying a similar process to mental models for space development. But I cut my teeth on first saving my own life with it where I don't give a flying fuck what YOU think because CF is very deadly and debilitating, so I only care "What does CF say about that?"
Footnote
If you already have records of your blood pressure readings and can reasonably confidently add SOME information about what you ate recently, you may be able to jumpstart a health journal. I would still give it a few days to record stuff LIVE, but if you have partial records, you may be able to draw a reasonable conclusion fairly quickly for purposes of moderately tweaking your diet.
You probably eat the most pork at whatever your main meal is for the day. So making notes of what you had for dinner recently may give you some reasonable information.
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