[DoreenMichele]

Color me skeptical. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I have gotten myself mostly well when that is not supposed to be possible. I was a homemaker for a long time. Eating right and germ control are a very large part of what I do and it isn't rocket science, as they say.

I also can see no means to turn it into a business model or income stream, nor even get anyone interested in benefiting from what I know for free. It isn't the magic bullet people are looking for. A spartan life, eating better and lots of walking is not an answer people want. It also isn't an answer that investors will fund.

Meanwhile, hey, lung transplants and $300k/year new drugs for CF are all the rage. That makes headlines and apparently makes money.

A business model for healthcare seems to produce Frankensteinian outcomes. Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich. They are actually quite challenging to promote at all.

I wish I saw it differently.

[dokein]

As a physician, you're absolutely right. There is a HUGE range of problems that can be made better by proper diet and regular exercise. Although there are a few efforts here and there, nobody has figured out a reliable way of changing human behavior when the initial action is hard but the rewards are far away. We seem only to be good at short-circuiting dopamine reward pathways so people log in to Facebook more often.

I'm not claiming to do better: my "give a motivational speech when I see you in clinic twice a year" approach certainly isn't worth shit.

But just because one approach is important does not mean others are snake oil. CF has a clear biological basis, and there are randomized, controlled trials proving that secretion management (e.g. DNase), glucose control, timely antibiotics and anti-inflammatory meds, and chest physiotherapy work. These trials also establish an average effect size (whereas your anecdote only tells me about you; I have also had patients who took similar measures but still died young). The average person with CF died at age 25 in 1986 -- today it's above 40.

[DoreenMichele]

controlled trials proving that secretion management (e.g. DNase),

The current mental model is that people with CF overproduce mucus and are drowning in their own mucus. I believe this to be incorrect. We underproduce mucus. Giving the body what it needs to produce enough mucus makes a big difference. Inadequate mucus production is one of the ways the body's immune system is compromised and fixing that is entirely about proper nutrition.

I am well aware of the increase in life expectancy thanks to better drugs. I also used to take about 8 or 9 maintenance drugs and they made life not worth living. I was in constant excruciating pain for 3.5 years. No amount of pain medication really stopped it and my sleep quality was atrocious. I got better in part because I wanted to hurt less and I did not care if that accidentally killed me.

I had a life before my diagnosis. After my diagnosis, all I had was drugs staving off death. I frankly can't comprehend why more people with CF don't commit suicide. It's a horrible way to live.

All the drugs have a six page handout listing side effects. They trade short term gains for long term costs, take credit for the benefits and blame your genes for long term negative impacts.

I am not against drugs. I was thrilled to get a diagnosis and be able to ask for Zithromax up front. But there are things very, very wrong with our current approach. If anyone but a doctor did such terrible things to someone, they would be charged with a crime.

I think I was unwelcome on CF lists in part because people who had literally tortured themselves or their child balked at hearing that maybe you don't have to be tortured. I think accepting the torture and making their peace with it was a necessary psychological survival mechanism and they probably could not even name their objection to what I was saying.

I don't hate physicians either. I'm having a terrible, terrible day and speaking to these issues on HN is basically evidence that I have finally snapped. I don't like hurting other people. But trying to not hurt other people is essentially killing me. These are things I cannot discuss anywhere. It isn't socially acceptable. And that is part of the problem. Other people not only can't speak of it, many seem incapable of even thinking about it. It isn't acceptable for someone with CF to want a life. Just not dying yet is supposed to be all we aspire to and that's it. And I am incapable of swallowing that.

[dokein]

Our current mental model (which is a bit more complicated than what is endorsed) is built upon evidence. The genetic mutation leading to CF was discovered, and the treatment (based on investigating this, rather than trying compounds at random) has extended lives.

Before clinical trials, doctors gave advice based on anecdotes (i.e. "experience"). As a whole we seemed to do no better than random chance, but we made sure to take credit for patients who naturally recovered.

Your experiences are important and 100% relevant to yourself, and nobody can ever devalue that. And it's also true that our understanding of the human body is extremely limited. But it's not clear to me that the magnitude of your personal suffering leads to generalized knowledge or a better mental model.

[DoreenMichele]

I don't believe so. I saw one study that said people with CF underproduced mucus. I used to have a link to it, but I think it disappeared at some point.

I have seen at least two discussions online about how vaginal dryness routinely ruins the sex lives of women with CF. I have yet to meet a woman with CF who brags that CF means she can handle 10 men a night at her regular orgies. Yet women with CF also produce a lot of goopy vaginal drainage, no doubt from infection. But it isn't mucus. If it were, vaginal dryness should not ruin their sex life.

I posit that people with CF are coughing up phlegm which is drainage from infection. Helping them produce healthy mucus can eventually put a stop to that.

My oldest son has the same diagnosis. I know other people with CF who have taken some pointers from me. It isn't accurate to say it is merely the anecdotal stories from a single person.

I appreciate you commenting. But our current mental models are inadequate and it is incredibly tiresome to be told for 17 years that I know nothing, my track record of success is just luck or something, etc.

Mental models tend to change only when the old guard dies. This is historical fact.

We probably should not waste anymore of each other's time. The odds are poor that it will be constructive.

[dokein]

Alright, I hope you continue to do well and wish you the best.

[hateduser2]

Why would you think this isn’t a socially acceptable POV? I’ve never heard it before and it doesn’t come across as noxious to me.

[DoreenMichele]

And yet it is being downvoted, which is one of the more polite responses I get. It used to be a lot uglier (even on HN, which is generally a bastion of civility) and I left a lot of lists, or was thrown off of them, where it simply wasn't constructive for me to try to participate.

[bitcrusher]

I would suggest that part of the reason is that it comes across as you having an axe to grind, rather than what you’re saying. The conversation was one party agreeing with you about there not being great treatment options until recently when studies have finally been conpleted with you saying, ‘you’re wrong, my experience proves it, anything you say is an attempt to invalidate my experience’

That is quite probably not at all what you intended but that is how I interpreted that exchange.

[DoreenMichele]

The enormous degree to which I am repeatedly invalidated is apparently lost on you. If I were being taken at all seriously then people would be asking me how on earth I am doing this, not being faux respectful on a foundation of "obviously she is full of crap and knows nothing."

Doctors never have any interest whatsoever in how I am getting healthier. They merely assure me it has zero relevance to anyone else on the planet.

[smoyer]

When we were hunter-gatherers, we had to exercise simply to harvest enough calories to meet our daily needs and our diet was limited to what was in season and available in our immediate range.

Today we have more leisure time than ever before in human history (well ... maybe not the HN crowd) but we're spending that time in increasingly sedentary hobbies/interests.

As a physician, does the idea that manufacturing and robotics will completely eliminate our need to work scare you at all? If the trend continues, will we truly be the space-faring humans in Wall-E - tied to our mechanical chairs and handicapped by our girth while life-spans decrease due to obesity-related diseases?

[dokein]

I'll do you one better. People who work in an office are actively damaging their health. No unemployment required. We know that walking around and being active all day is better even if you also ride a SoulCycle bike for 30 minutes a few times a week.

In the short term, I think there is actually more awareness today of exercise and its benefits than e.g. the 1990s, although there is a large discrepancy between socioeconomic classes and between metropolitan and rural areas.

In the long term, we may be able to reproduce the benefits of exercise. There are a couple drug compounds that are in investigation. This will likely require at least a two-orders-of-magnitude better understanding of the human body--I seriously doubt that targeting a receptor will do the trick.

Alternately, we can just solve the ability to summon willpower.

[spynxic]

> ..but we're spending that time in increasingly sedentary hobbies/interests.

And work. Don't forget work.

> As a physician, does the idea that manufacturing and robotics will completely eliminate our need to work scare you at all?

Suppose a robot assistant could replace 60% ~ 80% of your time in the office as a physician. You would then have more leisure time to spend as you wish.

[hyperpallium]

How about: there's this wonderful new drug, but the only way to get to the dispensary is to walk 1km.

[SRasch]

I relate to your sentiment, but it seems to me that promoting healthy lifestyles and inventing new cures doesn't have to be in opposition.

Like you, I spend a lot of time figuring out how to live better. But also grateful for the medicine I got for illnesses when they do arise.

I use and apply free health advice. Then again, I also use gym and supplements, which may have made VCs rich. Likewise, in cures, I appreciate that they are available in the low probability I get seriously ill. I am sure many suffering from alzheimer, cancer or other age-related diseases, would want there to be cures.

In the goal increasing healthspan, can't one favour the all-of-the-above approach? Primarily rely on healthy living like you suggest, yet support people developing cures for diseases.

PS. Almost all cures come from the US, 57 % of them, and 13 % from Switzerland. While this health care system is dysfunctional in many ways, it also is the market new cures are being developed for. In Europe, where I am from, most drugs are purchased by a single large purchaser, which has negotiation power to buy a drug at close to marginal cost. This makes drugs cheaper, but also makes less people try to invent new cures. So, it's a bit of a trade-off between the present and the future.

[DoreenMichele]

I am fine with all of the above. The problem is that our increasing focus on solutions someone can monetize and make a mint off of are steadily crowding out other options. YC has a lot of power. Adding their muscle to the goal of finding business solutions to health issues is very likely to deepen that problem.

I quit taking the flu vax years ago and have done better since. In the eyes of some people, this makes me a nutcase antivaxxer even though flu vaccines are not required.

When I was growing up, anyone getting vaccinated was a success. People who didn't weren't all that uncommon. Now we are shooting for 100% of the population being vaccinated and you need to justify not getting it.

The further we go down this road, the more those options narrow rather than expand. I am some nutter who "lives in a bubble" for preferring to limit my exposure to germs as effective prevention rather than live on prophylactic antibiotics all the time, never mind that one of the outcomes of putting people with CF on antibiotics constantly is a high incidence of C-dif infections which are then treated by surgically removing your colon. Limiting my exposure to other people and their germs is not viewed as a reasonable choice for avoiding that outcome.

I am not seeing similar amounts of muscle put into policy changes that are more family friendly, people friendly etc. Saying there is nothing wrong with developing this stuff ignores the context in which this is occurring. If all of the above were equally accepted answers, I would not get so much ugly and threatening push back for talking about the choices I have made. I should not need to defend the idea that I would just rather not be sick, thanks, and I am willing to limit my social life to have that. But I get outright attacked for that.

So you would be wise to be a tad more skeptical about where such things lead. They tend to lead to promoting one path over another, at the expense of the other, rather than a broadening of options.

[TeMPOraL]

Path dependence is a real phenomenon, yes, but then again, so is doing things that can be done, as opposed to those that can't.

How much effort do you think it would take to force the adult population into "healthy lifestyle" (as defined by the usual good diet and lots of exercise, etc.)? How would one even do that? I can't imagine anything over a) upending the industrial revolution and getting us all back to the farmer's life, b) just forcing everyone by arbitrary government restrictions on everything, or c) doing massive brainwashing of everyone. All of those strategies are infeasible, and could have bad side effects.

OTOH money spent on biomedical research can lead to figuring out one cause of one disease, and a subsequent cure. Then another. Then another. A lot of those could allow us to sidestep the lifestyle requirements, which I believe to be a good outcome. It expands options. (This - using medicine to not change lifestyle being good - is where I think our beliefs strongly differ.)

--

> I am some nutter who "lives in a bubble" for preferring to limit my exposure to germs as effective prevention rather than live on prophylactic antibiotics all the time,

What? Who on Earth does "prophylactic antibiotics"? I thought this was restricted to surgery and some other very special cases...

> Limiting my exposure to other people and their germs is not viewed as a reasonable choice for avoiding that outcome.

This is a very reasonable strategy and is often used, but has lifestyle costs, so people avoid doing it anyway... No blame to be put on doctors for that one.

> When I was growing up, anyone getting vaccinated was a success. People who didn't weren't all that uncommon. Now we are shooting for 100% of the population being vaccinated and you need to justify not getting it.

When you were growing up, polio was a thing. Now, it isn't. There's not just a correlation there, there's actual causation. We're shooting for 100% vaccination for some of the things, because vaccines work, and happen to work superlinearly - the more people are vaccinated, the more likely it is those who are not vaccinated will not get infected either. And some people can't be vaccinated for health reasons, so they rely on that so-called "herd immunity".

[DoreenMichele]

My dream job was to become an urban planner. Historically, city planners considered health effects of the design decisions that were made. This is basically no longer done.

Yet one thing harming health in the US is that most people find that long commutes are not an option. They are a necessity. The time spent behind the wheel is not only bad for your health, it robs you of time to do things like go to the gym or cook from scratch.

Most Americans don't want to spend that time behind the wheel. But there are huge obstacles to arranging to avoid it. Many Americans wish they had other options. If those options were made available, you would not need to force people to take them.

Though I wish you had just dropped it and walked away like you indicated you would do.

[TeMPOraL]

FWIW, I'm totally with you on what you just wrote about commute and urban planning. Seeing my city (in Europe) destroyed by developers is deeply saddening. We've opened up cities to the free market, and now everyone treats building as investments, putting residential and commercial structures where it makes zero sense, only further congesting the city. TBH, I don't feel like anyone is doing any actual urban planning anymore.

> Though I wish you had just dropped it and walked away like you indicated you would do.

Yeah, I should have. Couldn't stop myself. But I'm going to now. No more comments on the health stuff.

[jforman]

Every disease is a different beast, and biology is very hard to tame. We've thrown probably trillions of dollars at cancer over the past few decades, and only in the past few years, with immuno-oncology, has there been any real hope of progress toward broad cures (there was a heady moment after Gleevec, too, but that turned out to be the exception rather than the rule).

There was just a huge wave of Alzheimer's treatments that people were so hopeful might make any dent in the disease. They all failed, apparently because the breakthrough we thought we had made in understanding the disease turned out to be specious. Had the drugs made ANY improvement they'd be on the market and we'd all be bitching about how pharma "likes to make bandaids rather than cures," and that would have been a disservice to the years of toil people put into these drugs.

Not every pharma actor is a good actor. But overall the space is mostly filled with scientists and doctors trying to make people healthier, and mostly failing.

[tinokid]

>overall the space is mostly filled with scientists and doctors trying to make people healthier, and mostly failing.

Failing flat, i.e., not making people healthier but not making them sicker either, is not a problem. Failing down, i.e. trying to make people healthier but making them sicker instead, is and has been a huge problem with modern medicine, even when done with the best of intentions.

Yes, the past century has seen great progress in neutralizing infectious disease (though it is likely that the HIV epidemic itself was an "own goal" of basically iatrogenic origin [1]), but nearly everything else, including cancer, is a wash.

Unfortunately, a sober analysis of the benefits and harms of actors in the medical space cannot afford to give much credit for effort or good intentions.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6205/21

[xyhopguy]

To be fair though, we are really close with cancer. Like really really close. cfDNA is revolutionary for our measurements. Crispr is revolutionary for understanding. So close.

[jdale27]

To be fair though, we are really close with cancer. Like really really close. cfDNA is revolutionary for our measurements. Crispr is revolutionary for understanding. So close.

Just curious, on what do you base this opinion? Do you work in cancer research, or another biomedical field? These tools will definitely advance our understanding, but my feeling (as someone who worked in genomics for several years, though not in cancer) is that if you think "we are really close" to curing cancer (pardon me if I misinterpreted your statement) with these technologies, you are buying into a lot of hype around them. It's natural that that hype exists, though, given how much VC money is being poured into this area right now.

[xyhopguy]

can't say too much but I work on the stats side of liquid biopsy. Been in genomics (on the cs side) for the last 6 years. the encouring part to me is 1) we can predict the effect of a treatment given the tumors clonal composition, 2) we can test the effects of drugs much more quickly thx to crispr 3) easily profile a tumors composition with cfDNA.

1 and 3 imply we may be able to drive clonal evolution to a place where we can indefinitely treat patients. 2 gives us a lot more options.

[Fomite]

Note that it appears CRISPR will not be easy to implement in humans, thanks to some pre-existing immunities from frequently colonizing bacteria.

[xyhopguy]

Personally I see crispr more as a tool for functional genomics. It took like two decades to knockout all pairs of genes in yeast. With crispr I've seen people do it in a single experiment.

[DoreenMichele]

My father had Alzheimer's. He lived another 3 years after doctors announced he had six months left because my mom was a devoted wife who quit her job to take care of him.

He also survived colon cancer in his late 60s for the same reason and I flew out and took care of my sister after her first mastectomy with her first round of cancer. The doctors attributed my father's survival after they wrote him off for dead to my mother's care. They interviewed her on tape and changed the practices at their clinic based on what she had to say. From what I gather, two different cancer clinics began offering patients German Penaten cream to help their surgical scars heal because that was why my father's 16 inch surgical scar did so well.

I have zero reason to believe you are correct. There are some differences between different diseases. But my life's experience suggests that a) getting fed right b) getting proper care from someone who actually cares about you and c) adequate control over your environment are pretty universal beneficial, regardless of your exact diagnosis.

(But I'm just a woman, so not likely to be listened to. Yes, I'm feeling pretty bitter about that at the moment.)

[jforman]

Home care is important, but technology can make major impacts, too.

Here is a Kaplan-Meier curve for statins:

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/337/bmj.a2423/F2.large.jpg?wi...

That is a lot of life that these drugs have given a whole lot of people.

AIDS is largely a managed disease now, thanks to therapeutics, starting with AZT.

Steve Jobs thought that he needed better nutrition to manage his disease, and he was wrong. He had a chance of living a much longer life had he let medicine intervene earlier.

(And I had no idea what your gender was until you mentioned it. I'm sorry that you don't feel heard.)

[belorn]

Getting familiar food regularly, having someone who genuinely cares about you, and having control of your environment are all medically recognized (with peer reviewed research to support it) methods to reduce stress and stress hormones.

And stress is a significant factor in mortality rates. Its a major predictor for long life and health. It impacts metabolism, pain reception and recovery rates, and reduced stress in surgical patients is a universal good regardless of diagnosis. Its not a cure. It won't stop an infection or cure cancer, but the benefits are very real and has a good bit of research behind it.

[TeMPOraL]

> But my life's experience suggests that a) getting fed right b) getting proper care from someone who actually cares about you and c) adequate control over your environment are pretty universal beneficial, regardless of your exact diagnosis.

Not sure what your point is. Those things are helpful, can extend healthspan a bit, but they're also completely orthogonal to medicine, and are not solutions.

[DoreenMichele]

Wow, completely orthogonal. So, curing Rickets and Scurvy by identifying the nutritional deficiencies behind them us totally not an advance in medicine.

This explains a lot of what is wrong with medicine today. It was different when I was growing up. Doctors would treat all the kids in the family at one time so some infection didn't simply get passed around endlessly. We seem to have stopped doing that, and we wonder why drug resistance is such a problem.

[TeMPOraL]

I meant that in context of your entire comment tree; e.g. things like:

> Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see you implying something like "why do medicine, if we could eat less 'junk food', work less and smile more instead".

> curing Rickets and Scurvy by identifying the nutritional deficiencies behind then us totally not an advance in medicine

That's indeed the domain of medicine. Which will tell you, "you need more nutrient $X in your diet" as a solution to the problem, instead of "eat healthier" (for values of 'healthier' determined by current fitness fashion).

[DoreenMichele]

That's indeed the domain of medicine. Which will tell you, "you need more nutrient $X in your diet" as a solution to the problem, instead of "eat healthier" (for values of 'healthier' determined by current fitness fashion).

That sounds just really arbitrarily personally hostile towards me.

I have gone through multiple blogs in which I have tried to lay out specific nutritional recommendations for people with CF. The few people who have tried it have gotten results.

I have done everything within my own power to try to elucidate specifics no different from the examples of Rickets and Scurvy being caused by nutritional deficiencies. But it does not get taken seriously and I can find no path forward for that, and not due to lack of trying. One woman said she would write a paper with me on the subject, then arbitrarily changed her mind. Her son died of CF. She was a smoker. I don't think she really wants to admit that her smoking helped kill him. She wants to find a pill that makes everything OK and absolves whatever guilt she carries.

The CF community is not interested in what I am doing. So there probably is no path forward here. I fully expect to die in obscurity having never accomplished anything at all with my life.

But this arbitrary validation of nutrition as medicine, unless I am doing it and then it is somehow hokum, is just one of the craziest things I have ever seen on HN.

[new299]

I guess there are a few issues with this:

The first is, anecdotes are interesting, but is there data that supports this? It seems like there are too many variables, and that at home care may not help in all circumstances anyway.

Secondly, "getting proper care from someone who actually cares about you" by which I guess you mean a family member or close friend. Is not viable is many circumstances...

Finally, I guess it comes down to "what do you actually do". If it proves helpful, what can you do to promote this? Fund family member to quit their jobs to care for relations? It seems like that would be open to abuse and difficult to administer.

[DoreenMichele]

The US is on a very short list of countries that do not provide maternity leave and iirc it is the only country on that list that does not have the excuse that we are too poor and underdeveloped to afford it. We could start with just providing maternity leave as a small step forward here. It is a well proven model with lots of examples out there and not terribly open to abuse because you have to have a baby to get it.

I would be fine if we provided parental leave for both parents when a child is born. But I would be happy with just bringing the US into the 21st century and getting on the same page as basically the rest of the planet and just starting with maternity leave. I only mention parental leave because if I don't, you can guarantee someone will accuse me of something nefarious for not explicitly stating that.

[new299]

I agree that parental leave is valuable (though I'd love to see data supporting this if you have it).

But it seems like a very different issues that increasing health care outcomes in general.

[DoreenMichele]

Well, color me speechless. I don't think we have anything further to discuss.

[blintz]

"Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner"

Are families with two working parents actually less healthy? Do you have a source for that?

[DoreenMichele]

No, I don't have a source.

We are seeing a huge rise in problem pregnancies, birth defects, etc. There are likely a number of contributing factors to that reality. It isn't PC to wonder if maybe the rise of female careers is at related. That is viewed as antifeminist and so on.

Women routinely take time off work to care for relatives, whether their own children or other relatives. They get no credit for this vital work and how it impacts the health of people.

My experience suggests there isn't any point in trying to prove it. It won't get taken seriously anyway.

It is common knowledge that small kids in daycare have more health issues. My sister, who has a career and works for the CDC, used to quote studies at me about that. She managed to stay home with her only child for the first few years.

But, of course, in searching for info to support the idea that small kids in daycare get sick more, one of the most prominent pieces I can find is a PC piece assuring parents that the increased negative health effects of early daycare "has a protective effect later." Meanwhile, the study completely excludes data on, for example, hospital stays. Looks nicely spun to me.

Other pieces outright admit that staying home is simply not an option for many women and go on to talk about how best to protect your child from germs at daycare rather than exploring statistics. Yet the fact that you can google the question and there are pieces trying to address it at all suggests it is a real issue and parents ask about the problem a lot. But society can't fix it, so it isn't really comfortable to admit that it is a real issue.

Home cooked meals are also generally healthier than takeout, microwave meals, etc. Two career couples tend to not do a lot of cooking from scratch. Diet significantly impacts health.

[jacobolus]

Of course kids in {daycare, school, the playground, riding the bus, ...} get sick (especially lots of minor viral infections) more often than kids who live in a hermetically sealed bubble, never share toys, and only ever interact with a couple of adults. Adults who never leave home also get sick less often than adults who go to school, work, etc.

But it is also the case that the human immune system remembers various kinds of foreign agents that it has seen and is more effective fighting them off later (hence immunization as an idea), and there seems to be some evidence that excessive hygiene results in allergies, autoimmune diseases, etc. See for a start https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

It is pretty unfortunate if parents can’t afford to keep their kids home for a week or two if they get seriously sick, though.

[DoreenMichele]

We have 7 billion people on the planet and in my lifetime we went from more than half of all people living in rural environs to more than half of all people living in cities. Your hostile description of living in a bubble was the default norm for human life until very recently. The aberration here is not people with limited contact to others. The aberration is that in recent decades it is the new norm to work at a job that exposes you to many people every day and attend a public school that exposes you to many people every day.

We do nothing to really account for this being a historical aberration for the species and then wonder why we have antibiotic resistant infections. They get that way in part by running through many, many people and having vastly more chances to evolve.

[jacobolus]

The “default norm for human life” through most of time was either living in the forest, or living as a peasant on a farm. Peasants living on farms have historically had half of their children die in infancy, and generally poor health and short life spans afterward, because they eat an unbalanced diet mostly consisting of staple starches, spend half their time breathing wood smoke near a hearth fire, do strenuous repetitive manual work their whole lives, etc. People living in the forest were generally healthier, except sometimes they starved, were violently killed, or the like.

Folks living on farms or in the forest generally don’t have autoimmune problems because they have constant exposure to animals, a wide variety of plants, etc. On average (especially the peasants) they have poorer health than folks living in cities, but the distribution of health problems is fairly different between the three groups.

Deadly plagues (viral and bacterial) have ripped through through and decimated agricultural societies relatively often, at least in the past couple millennia. Many crippling diseases have also been endemic in many places (especially tropical regions) as far back as we have records. Modern medicine and lifestyle (indoor plumbing, vaccines, antibiotics, refrigeration, mosquito control, medicines for killing parasites, ...) have done an amazing job preventing those in wealthy countries.

Does anyone wonder why we have antibiotic resistant bacteria? I thought that was pretty widely understood (at least by those who accept the science of evolution)...

[DoreenMichele]

None of your points in any way justifies suggesting one is living in a bubble if they choose to limit their exposure to large groups as a form of germ control. I don't live in a bubble. I do avoid large crowds, among other things.

I see zero reason to suggest that trying to keep small kids home and out if public daycare somehow us weird, aberrant, helicopter parenting. Small kids being at home with family was the norm for most of human history.

Tossing in stats in how bad life was for peasants isn't genuinely a rebuttal. It is, at best, smoke and mirrors to deflect the point.

[dragonwriter]

> We have 7 billion people on the planet and in my lifetime we went from more than half of all people living in rural environs to more than half of all people living in cities. Your hostile description of living in a bubble was the default norm for human life until very recently

Modern rural living in the developed world is not much like rural living in most of history, so, no the modern rural living the GP criticized was not the “default norm” for most of history.

> The aberration here is not people with limited contact to others. The aberration is that in recent decades it is the new norm to work at a job that exposes you to many people every day and attend a public school that exposes you to many people every day.

From the various descriptions of historical rural life (e.g., medieval European village life) I've seen, neither adults nor children having daily contact with numbers of other people rather than being isolated with their nuclear family was at all uncommon; for most of history that wouldn't be school for children or wage labor for adults, but it would still happen.

[DoreenMichele]

You have a personal track record of attacking me and being incredibly dismissive of me. I asked you once to simply leave me alone. You informed me that was not a reasonable request and affirmed your right to do as you please towards me.* I view your behavior towards me as a form of harassment.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848464

[subcosmos]

You've effectively hit the nail on the head, but it is actually within the purview of what YC is specifically focused on regarding diseases of aging.

Aging biology is all about understanding how diseases develop to begin with, and lifestyle interventions are definitely part of that umbrella of research. Those of us who obsess over aging biology tend to prefer thinking about preventative strategies first, and rejuvenation as a fallback.

[feistypharit]

Don't, you're mostly right. The model is broken. I think the US is in a giant bubble right now, in 100 years will be like most of Europe is today. That is...better.

[Lxr]

> Things that are actually health promoting, like having a full-time parent to care for the kids and primary breadwinner, eating right, exercise etc are boring and don't make VCs rich.

Fair enough, but there are also plenty of conditions for which these things don’t work adequately, and we absolutely do need to encourage research. I think this is a great move from YC.

[ryanx435]

A great site that provides specialty diet foods (no affiliation: my sister buys from them) is http://med-diet.com

They have all kinds of great food to choose from