Quote:
Originally Posted by rubicon
I have been so conflicted about the conflicting information that is being decimated by so called experts. ... What's a person going to do? Who can a person believe?
Its maddening
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A couple thoughts. The low hanging fruit in improving health has been picked. Sanitation, immunization, clean food and water and air. Those have been huge. Add antibiotics, anesthesia and surgery and the medical industry has had all those for 50 years or longer. So now there is just nibbling at the edges of life. Premie care, enormously expensive, and successful for many infants. Cancer care which adds years of life if the patient is young but not so much for the elderly cancer patient even if successful. So how can you live a little longer or a little healthier or both? Does lowering lipids help? Does weight control really matter, and to what degree? Are vitamins a scam? Is coffee harmful?
Proving antibiotics help in strep was easy.
Denny FW, Wannamaker LW, Brink WR. Prevention of rheumatic fever. Treatment of the preceding streptococcic infection. JAMA. 1950;143(2):151-3.
It involved a few hundred patients on a military base where there was an unbelievably high rate of rheumatic fever. Some got penicillin some didn't and the results were clear. It only was a few days of medicine and a few months of follow up. However the little tweaks to get those last few years better require years of medicine, or not medicine, or other interventions. Getting enough patients and the proper controls is phenomenally difficult expensive and the results are never really clear. So one study done with a different approach to the same question may get a conflicting result with another. Relax. Think of it as similar to working on your Nascar vehicle. All the easy stuff is the same for everyone. It is really hard to get that last 1 MPH out of the car. One time the tweak works, next time it doesn't. Different racing surface, weather, mood of the driver. Only after hundreds of ovals do you think you've got the adjustment right. But maybe not for next year's model or a different track. And sometimes that little tweak makes the engine fail. You didn't do anything wrong, you're just at the extreme edge of getting a little more out of the car and that can happen.
The public's expectation that we will all live healthy and forever is wrong. I am 100% certain I will die no matter what I do.