The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I agree that trusting one's doctor, by default, makes a lot of sense, at least where data and empirical knowledge is concerned. However, there is one more methodological problem that is often missed - the unknown unknowns. Let's consider the following scenario - and I am making it completely ridiculous on purpose, to emphasize the point and not get bogged in the details. Let's assume we have a miracle drug that reduces your cholesterol with no noticeable side effects. Except in 10 years after you start taking it, your dick falls off. Obviously, no reasonable test can detect it - who runs 10 years of tests before putting the drug on the market? There's no way to know it, until people start noticing a suspicious increase in dicks falling off, try to make various statistical correlations and hopefully after several years of vigorous bickering zero in on the miracle drug and remove it from the market. In the meantime, people who took it in those 10+X years are preparing lawsuits and regretting their choices.
There's no reasonable way to prevent it - nobody can run enough tests to predict every effect and every drug+patient+environment combination. And nobody tries to, because trying to do it would paralyze any innovation way beyond the best efforts of FDA to do it. No doctor, no matter how diligent and educated, can know everything and predict everything. So there's always a risk. Often it's worth it, and I am not arguing against any intervention. I am just arguing for remembering there's always this unquantifiable risk component lurking in the background, and one has to remember it too.
If the doctor says "you have to do it, or you're going to be in serious trouble, the pills are the only way" - fine, do it. But if they say "you may try to change your lifestyle, or if it sounds too hard there are pills, your choice" I'd personally choose to try the non-pills way first.
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