HN user
Oh man, the most helpful article I’ve ever read about depression and burnout was on Kuro5hin. Luckily it’s been preserved on Wikibooks:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Demystifying_Depression
Still holds up well two decades later.
First, I don’t know why you feel the need to include a hostile ad hom barb like “You seem to think evolutionary theory came to an end in 1882”.
I’ve done multiple Google searches and even done Google Books searches in the very book you linked, for the exact phrase “promoter gene”, and it really doesn’t seem to be a term that’s used, at all, really.
DNA promoters are well recognized, but not in the context you’re talking about.
I can very much understand the notion that genes may act to further their own propagation at the cost of the host’s fitness - sure.
It’s just that we first need to see evidence that it’s happening, by having a clear definition of what favours vs costs the host’s fitness.
The hypothesis you’ve cited (and from the book reviews it seems even the authors concede their hypotheses are highly speculative), seems to start with the assumption that these mental illness traits are opposed to the host’s fitness and confer no benefits whatsoever.
But all we have to do is point out the many cases in which these traits actually do benefit the host, which I did and you even conceded in the last line of your comment, and the hypothesis is void.
It reminds me of the “junk DNA” hypothesis, where researchers couldn’t find an obvious use for large sections of the genome so just assumed it to be useless and called it “junk”, only to be later found to have very important roles:
https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/articl...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-complex-truth-about-junk-...
This feels like a just-so story.
There are perfectly plausible reasons why the conditions we regard as mental illness are adaptations that help evolutionary fitness:
- Depression puts one into a low-energy, contemplative state that enables reflection, healing and formulation of reformed ways of thinking and being ("dark night of the soul");
- Bipiolar is a pattern of swinging between high-energy bursts of inspiration and creation, and low-energy states of recuperation and reflection;
- Schizophrenia is a way of disassociating from real-world experiences that are too painful to experience with normal consciousness, and is a preferable alternative (from an evolutionary perspective) to suicide, buying time for processing and healing to take place, given the right kind of support.
Of course, that could be seen as a "just so" story too. Except that evolutionary theory says that only genes that promote evolutionary fitness should survive and spread through the genome, particularly given that replication of any given gene carries a significant cost. We can also easily observe that conditions like depression and schizophrenia normally develop in response to a trigger - i.e., a traumatic life event or extended period of abuse.
So, it's far less of a confected story to just accept that these conditions have been retained in the genome for the reason that makes most sense according to evolutionary theory: it's evolutionarily beneficial for them to be there.
I’ve largely overcome CFS with a variety of treatments over more than about 15 years. Most of the treatments are physical therapies (particular nutrition and exercise approaches), but an unconventional subconscious emotional healing modality has been fundamentally important. After a few years of doing just physical treatments, things only really started to change once I tried the emotional healing approach, which only happened by chance when a physical therapist said “maybe this will help”; I didn’t go looking for it as I was so focused on the physiological symptoms (pain, inflammation, weakness/exhaustion), and psychologists/psychiatrists I’d seen before said I seemed fine enough.
So, yes, the treatment that worked for me is unconventional. I mean of course it’s going to be unconventional: as this article reminds us yet again, the medical establishment has been trying to explain (or dismiss) this condition for decades by adhering to conventional understandings of health and getting nowhere. So an approach that currently seems unconventional is the only way there can ever be any headway with this issue.
I’ve long said I would like to be involved in research into the condition and into the treatments I’ve found beneficial. Any researchers who want to talk to me, or anybody interested in supporting or being involved in this kind of research is welcome to contact me.
As this article reaffirms, CFS/ME advocates frequently insist that the condition must be taken seriously because it is fundamentally a physically-rooted condition; as if (a) emotions/traumas can’t cause or exacerbate physical symptoms, or (b) that conditions that are rooted in emotions and trauma should be taken any less seriously than those that are primarily physical. Of course both these positions are plainly false.
The real problem is that mainstream medicine just doesn’t give much credence to the notion that emotions and physical symptoms can be deeply connected. (And to be clear I come from a background of strict acceptance of scientific and medical orthodoxy).
Ok I watched it, thanks.
I’m not sure if it is meant to make me aware of anything I wasn’t already aware of, but for the record, I’ve spent much of the past 10+ years thinking about the pros and cons of this work and wrestling with the risks/pitfalls she describes (as well as eschewing stoicism for pretty much those reasons).
One of the biggest changes from doing this work is that I’ve become less repressed and more compassionate and emotionally available, as well as being more committed to working to overcome societal injustice and dysfunction.
I'm not "stoic" or much into any other "ism", and don't particularly align with many other people in "STEM" fields.
The practices I've discovered came after many years of experiencing debilitating emotional and physical pain, which is now mostly resolved, though not completely, hence the ongoing work.
That it's common for people to be influenced more by cognitive biases and other emotional patterns than logic is not exactly a novel or controversial notion, but it's easily forgotten, particularly by people who self-describe as "rationalist" (which I very much don't).
Anyway, I frequent HN in the hope of avoiding sneery comments like this one, which seems to break the guidelines.
I suffered a rare illness (still have it...)
with a low everything
You have an illness. That's all there is to it. Don't be ashamed. I think you probably have an illness of the kind that mainstream medicine/society is very bad at understanding, treating and accommodating. I know you think it's "in control", but that's likely because you don't even know what it's like to feel and be "normal".
Everyone who seems to be doing so much better than you is doing it in a way that comes fairly naturally to them, as their health, and the way the feel and think is very different. It's not your fault that it hasn't worked out this way for you yet.
I've been through a somewhat similar path. It's awful, I know, I really do. I'm 45 and only just fully overcoming the illness I've had for much of my life - I desperately hope. It took till my very-late 30s to start earning a good income, and I became a father for the first time at 43. Life is now pretty good and getting better. But I've had to endure so much pain and shame on the way here.
Be kind to yourself. You're still very young. Keep getting therapy. Do more research into what's doing on in your body and how to get your body and mind working better. There are many options. It will probably take a long time to figure it out and get to a place where life is really great, but you absolutely can get on to a path where you're feeling better, functioning better and achieving better things week by week, then in several years you'll look back and be amazed at how far you've come.
Pay no attention to your peers who seem to be doing "better" than you now. Many of them will crash and burn in their late 20s or 30s, or just end up mediocre in middle-age. I see it a lot. If you get onto a path of healing and growth now you can live a life of steady improvement and optimism that will be incredibly fulfilling.
I wish you all the best.
It's a very common reaction for people to assert that the solution to a deep societal problem is to "stop [group] from [doing action] to [another group]", as if that's an answer, rather than the beginning of a very long list of questions, most of which don't currently have answers, or at least not widely accepted ones (hence the problem continuing to be pervasive).
I spent a lot of my early adulthood thinking the depression/anxiety/dependency that afflicted me was the fault of others, including parents, peers who'd bullied me, former partners/friends who'd betrayed me, etc. And on one level there's truth to it, until you realise all those people were acting in reaction to abuse and trauma they'd suffered, so it's futile to scapegoat everything onto particular individuals or categories of people.
For what it's worth, I am personally trying to undertake work that over the long term would help society to be better at alleviating these trauma cycles and avert the patterns of abuse we see everywhere, but I'm under no illusion that it will be fast or easy, or even that it's likely that the approaches I've found to be effective would be embraced widely enough to have any impact at all. I'll keep trying, however.
I've been living "as if" this is true for over 10 years.
After years of struggling with confidence issues, anxiety, and physiological issues like muscle tension/pain and inflammation, and trying all the conventional modalities with minimal lasting benefit, I came onto a form of healing that seeks to address subconsciously-held traumas picked up and earlier life and inherited from parents.
Without making this a long, detailed post, the results are profound and lasting, though slow, given how deep this stuff goes and how much there can be to work through once you start digging.
There are books and talks about it by a former Stanford biologist called Bruce Lipton, who gets panned for various reasons that seem mostly to do with him being out of step with conventional thought, and (I think) for having a manner that doesn't seem science-y enough, but in my experience his research and teachings on the links between inherited/held emotions and biology and on the physiological benefits of subconscious healing are very solid.
I'm really hoping to see more research and widespread interest in this topic, as after experiencing it and contemplating it for so many years, I'm convinced it offers many answers, or at least clues, to issues that medical science and broader society have been stuck on for a long time.
I think you're ending up splitting hairs here, starting out by initially (apparently) saying drugs should be avoided, but then coming around to the position that LSD or mushrooms would be much better than MDMA, even though plenty of others would warn people off LSD and mushrooms in just the same way as you've done with MDMA.
It's tricky talking about drugs that are illegal and that can be harmful, but can also be highly beneficial and safe when taken under the right conditions. Let's try to avoid blanket condemnations and moralising; HN is meant to be a place for more nuanced discussions than that.
MDMA has for several decades been widely reported, anecdotally, to bring about profound, lasting, changes in people's emotional states, and to set them on long-term journeys of personal growth. And in recent years many governments around the world have green-lit medical trials into its benefits for various kinds of emotional/psychiatric conditions, though of course few people have access to these trials.
So, let's not be so dismissive of someone being open enough to share their personal experience.
Thanks for the reply. No DMs on HN but you can email me (address in profile).
Some friends have a 7-year-old son who is being assessed/treated for autism-spectrum disorder; he's outgoing, sociable and highly intelligent, but has issues with emotional and behavioural dysregulation and can often get into kind of manic states. One of the techniques I've seen his parents use when he's getting into these states is to ask "where are you feeling this in your body?", then for him to focus on that region while using controlled breathing to calm down.
Re this: There is also the possibility of using interoception training as a form of mental health treatment
This kind of thing exists, though still in the fringes. I've been using versions of it for over 10 years to resolve the effects of many earlier-life experiences caused ongoing charged reactions and chronic mental and physiological issues (after years of mainstream medical treatment and therapy was ineffective). It's very much a process of identifying and letting go of the way these experiences (often described as traumas, but not always in that category) are held/felt in different parts of the body ("butterflies the stomach" when nervous is the most obvious example, but goes much much further/deeper than this).
I'm now completely free of depression and mostly free of anxiety and fatigue/pain issues (CFS/ME) but still continuing to progress.
If any researches/professionals working in this field happen to be reading this, I'd love to get in touch.
I think I understand what you're feeling. I'm lucky to have found my way through my period of feeling lost, and have come to a pretty good place as I approach 45 (fathered my first child two years ago, have increasingly good relationships with my partner, family, friends, etc, and have new career/startup opportunities taking shape that are exciting to me). But it's been a long road of feeling very lost and doing deep soul searching to get here.
Some places I'd recommend looking for guidance/inspiration/support:
- Writers/speakers on topics relating to "the meaning crisis"; people like John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist, Rafia Morgan and Jonathan Pageau. There are some good video interviews with them and others on the Rebel Wisdom YouTube channel.
- Consider a men's group (assuming you're male; equivalent groups exist for women and other identity groups); I've been in a local chapter of Evryman for the past couple of years, and others I've known have been in The Mankind Project. These kinds of groups can be a great way to connect with other men who are seeking meaning and encouragement to achieve better life outcomes. I've seen some amazing transformations in the men I've known to go through these groups.
- Don't think you're "just depressed". While of course it's possible you could have a clinical condition, and it's worth exploring that and seeking treatment if need be, don't let people tell you that feeling lost in this world is merely a sign of depression. It can be a very healthy reaction to notice that the world is pretty messed up and to feel that there must be a way to find a more fulfilling life path.
Also, feel free to contact me (email address in profile). I'm thinking about starting a new kind of community for people who are looking to heal and grow.
All the best to you.
It's hard to recommend stuff here (I've been trying for years to work out how to reply to this answer FWIW), as a lot of the popular books about it are too close to law-of-attraction, Tony Robbins, Think and Grow Rich kind of stuff, or linked to the chiropractic field, which is a turnoff for a lot of for most people here, for reasons I understand, as I don't subscribe to much of that myself.
I also don't want to recommend particular practices here, lest I be seen as making health recommendations, which I'm not qualified to do.
I've written a lot of content about my own journey, which can help people to know what different practices are available and enable people to decide for themselves what practices are worth trying. Anyone is welcome to email me (address in bio) if they want to read what I've written. I also have a Discord group for people who want to discuss this stuff with other folks who are interested (pretty much everyone in the group is from HN).
But if you just want publicly available info and modalities, try these:
Authors: Gabor Maté, Peter Levine, Bruce Lipton, Bradley Nelson, Stan & Christina Grof.
Modalities: NET, Psych-K, Somatic Experiencing, Holotropic Breathwork, EFT/Tapping, Family Constellations, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy (but not NLP, in my opinion).
Not sure if it counts as spiritual, but for 10 years I've consistently done subconscious, mind+body healing exercises. It's been profoundly transformative.
Prior to that (and for quite a while after) I had a huge amount of drama and chaos in my life, and after searching far and wide for answers (starting with the usual stuff - mainstream therapy, meditation, etc) I learned about these healing practices, which address the physiological reactions that happens when we experience triggering events.
Over time, my practice has developed into this: try to live a normal, well-functioning life, do my best at whatever I do. When things happen that trigger reactions - anger, resentment, arrogance, jealousy, contempt, shame, etc, or anything that makes me feel a jolt or even very mild visceral reaction, undertake the practice, which enables me to find where in my past the reaction comes from, then do a brief breathing exercise to let it go. Rinse and repeat. Over time, the reactions weaken, my overall stress burden diminishes (along with physiological issues like inflammation, chronic pain, etc), and bit by bit life gets simpler and important indicators like relationships and career steadily imrove.
Cheers. I take a small selection of supplements - mostly minerals/vitamins and digestive support but also some amino acids. Not NAC these days, but I may again. My main antioxidant supplement at the moment is Alpha-lipoic Acid.
There are many brands listed on iHerb (all with "dietary supplement" prominently listed in the product description), though most of the items are marked "out of stock", so it looks like many people have been stocking up.
From my own experience I can very much believe an SSRI could have an effect on the immune system and/or the respiratory system.
I was a heavy cigarette smoker in my 20s, and over those years, I experienced worsening asthma and also worsening anxiety and depression.
Eventually I was prescribed an SSRI (Zoloft), and found that not only did my mood change, my asthma completely abated, even though I was still smoking just as much.
After a few months I decided I didn't like all that the SSRI was doing to my psyche, so when the prescription finished I tapered off it, and sure enough the asthma returned a few months later.
I've never enquired much as to what what was going on - I didn't speak to doctors or other people about it. But the correlation between SSRI intake and asthma abatement was very clear.
(And yes I know it was very stupid to be smoking as an asthmatic - I quit completely the following year and have stayed off them for coming-on 15 years. I've also been mostly asthma-free in that time, though it returned for a few months about 7 years ago, after a period of intense career-related stress, but then cleared up after I undertook some healing work that included both immune-system support and emotional healing.)
It's hard to answer without triggering backlash in places like this, as the whole world of this kind of healing is a minefield of quackery and woo. It's taken me a long time to work through it all and be able to winnow out the practitioners and practices that are solid. And it's tricky to recommend stuff online, as some of it is linked to chiropractic (which I'm still not generally a fan of), and there are big-selling authors who have written multiple books about these topics, some of which is great, but some of which would be a dealbreaker for many.
Having said all that, if you're keen to research this stuff yourself, look up "Neuro Emotional Technique" and Psych-K, and look for books by Dr Bruce Lipton and Bradley Nelson.
But I'm happy to share more about my own experiences and practices if you contact directly. Email address is in my profile.
Of NET, some small trials by fringe researchers have been conducted [1] (or just planned [2]), but none has had much impact.
This 2017 study [3] seemed to find promising results:
Changes in cerebellar functional connectivity and autonomic regulation in cancer patients treated with the Neuro Emotional Technique for traumatic stress symptoms
...
Results: The results demonstrated significant changes in the NET group, as compared to the control group, in the functional connectivity between the cerebellum (including the vermis) and the amygdala, parahippocampus, and brain stem. Likewise, participants receiving the NET intervention had significant reductions in autonomic reactivity based on heart rate response to the traumatic stimulus compared to the control group.
That result seems to warrant further research, but I can't see it happening at any significant scale.
I've thought/read at length about the state of research into these kinds of modalities, and have concluded that it doesn't and won't happen at scale, due to a combination of these reasons:
- The cost/effort to run a large, controlled trial, including longitudinal research (you'd really need to monitor people over at least 5, but ideally 10+ years to get the best results) would be huge.
- No body with the resources to conduct such a trial is sufficiently motivated to do so, as there's no drug discovery or other outcome that can yield billions of dollars in revenues.
- The chiropractic profession exists at the fringes of medical practice (for generally valid reasons) and is too "hot" for any government or major research institution to want to touch.
The same goes for the work of the researchers I mentioned in other comments; Gabor Maté, Stan/Christina Grof, Peter Levine, Bruce Lipton and others. They've done plenty of qualitative research through their careers, and have written many papers and built solid careers as writers and seminar speakers for sizeable-but-still-niche audiences (of mostly very privileged people with plenty of spare time and money to devote to this kind of healing work). But parlaying that into large-scale studies just never seems feasible, no matter how compelling their findings.
But I think it's profoundly important work, as I'm sure it has the potential to transform the existing psychology/psychiatry fields, so, who knows, maybe something will click one day to make something happen.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nih.gov+neuro-emotional...
Sure, thanks, but remember we're adults here, and pretty well educated ones at that, so, the need for caution and discernment can be presumed to be understood by readers on this site :)
For what it's worth, plenty of books have been written about these concepts over several decades; some authors include Gabor Maté, Bruce Lipton, Stanislav and Christina Grof, Peter Levine and Iain McGilchrist, all of whom have advanced academic credentials in psychiatry or biomedical science.
So, yeah, there's no "generalizing from the experiences of one person to all psychological conditions"; there's sharing one anecdote as an example of what many experts have known for years (even if those experts' research findings aren't used much in formulating the DSM or applied by your average neighborhood psychiatrist, for reasons that are a whole other discussion!).
This is where discussions about this stuff can go off the rails, as the main modality I've used has links to the chiropractic profession (even though I think that profession is highly dysfunctional and many or even most of its practitioners are quacks at best and frauds at worst).
Anyway, the modality I've most used is a technique called NET (neuro-emotional technique), which (I believe) is similar to a practice called Psych-K (I've never done this one but I'm told they're similar). Both of them use muscle-testing to identify incongruences between different aspects of the mind and body (e.g., conflicting/incompatible desires, beliefs or values).
I've also done plenty of Holotropic Breathwork and Ericksonian Hypnosis, some EMDR, some EFT/Tapping, and some use of basic affirmations. Someone else I know well has done a lot of a practice called Family Constellations, as well as another practice that focuses on healing the trauma of birth - though I've not done either of those practices.
Out of necessity (after existing conventional treatments offered little help) I've been conducting a 10+ year self-experiment related to this topic.
Like others have described, when I started experiencing symptoms of conditions resembling anxiety, depression, ADHD, mild bipolar, paranoia and CFS/ME, I initially sought mainstream medical psychiatric treatment and undertook talk therapy and was prescribed anti-anxiety (benzos) and antidepressant (SSRI) medications. There was some relief but there were also unpleasant side-effects, and I just had a strong feeling these treatments were not really addressing the core problems, and indeed I even felt like the symptoms were fairly normal reactions to the life experiences I'd endured.
Later I tried to heal myself with nutritional and exercise-based approaches, and relatively conventional emotional approaches like meditation. Again, some mild/temporary improvements were noticeable, but they were inadequate, and it still felt like there was something deeper I needed to connect with.
About 8 years ago, I found an approach that involves identifying and releasing traumas, attitudes, behavioural patterns, self-perceptions and defense mechanisms that are held in the subconscious mind, particularly ones that have been attained in early life and have snowballed through repetition compulsion [1] (a concept that Freud first articulated).
I've been undertaking these approaches continually since I discovered them, and bit by bit all the symptoms have resolved.
My experience has confirmed, at least to me, that these conditions are "adaptive responses to adversity" (or something else related to that concept), and that in order to heal the symptoms, I needed to understand their basis at a very deep level; as Jung said, "making the unconscious conscious" [2].
Once that had been done, adopting new, healthy attitudes and behaviours and living free of those symptoms has been fairly easy; i.e., healthier behaviours just emerged naturally once the causes of the unhealthy behaviours were identified and understood.
If any researchers or laypeople are interested to know more about the techniques I've used and the results I've experienced, I'm happy to be contacted (email address in profile). None of the approaches I've used or their underlying hypotheses are novel; it's been written/spoken about extensively by veteran experts on mind+body health including Maté and Bruce Lipton. But there doesn't seem to be much in the way formal studies into these concepts, so I'd be happy to connect with anyone working in the field or anyone else interested to explore further.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetition_compulsion
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/44379-until-you-make-the-un...
Fair enough, I expanded my comment with more explanation and detail.
I usually get asked this and my standard reply is that I don't prefer not to get into discussions about specifics here, but I'm happy to share info via email, and I also host a Discord group where people interested can discus and share their own experiences with different techniques.
So, please feel free to email me (address is in my profile).
Edit: the reason I’m reticent about getting into details here is that I’ve learned from years of experience that discussions on HN about unconventional health approaches can (a) easily devolve into futile arguments with motivated skeptics, and (b) be unconducive to sharing the material with sufficient detail and caution, given that some people seeking this kind of info are at risk.
And whilst there are some materials around to point to, they’re not very specific about techniques, whereas I’ve done extensive experimentation with different techniques and documentation of my learnings, including tracking of physiological indicators, and can present/explain it in a way that is more palatable to HN-types who are genuinely interested.
But if anyone wants to read published authors on the topic, try Gabor Mate, Bruce Lipton, John Sarno and Bessel Van Der Kolk as starting points.
I've written several comments about this topic on HN before, but here goes again.
I've had a lot of mild/moderate anxiety and depression since early in life, and whilst it's never been severe enough for me to be at risk of doing harm to myself or others, it has been a major complication in achieving good outcomes (i.e., always showed some promise and early success at intellectual, sporting and social pursuits, but could never hold it together enough emotionally to get sustained results.)
At times of particular seriousness, medication provided some relief; mostly SSRIs (sertraline/Zoloft), which I've taken in low doses for a total of about 3 years, and occasional valium for acute anxiety. But whilst these medicines made life more bearable, they never made life feel "normal" or felt like any kind of complete solution.
Part of the issue I guess was that I had a really strong feeling that what I was experiencing wasn't a biological malfunction or predetermined trait. I guess I knew that from the fact that I'd been able to do quite well at things, and feel quite happy, at least some of the time, throughout my life. It didn't make sense that I'd be biologically programmed to be well-functioning some of the time, but not at others.
After a long search I discovered deep subconscious emotional healing techniques, that enabled me to connect with the programmed reactions and beliefs that I'd picked up from some unpleasant early life experiences, that had snowballed as I progressed through life.
I've been undertaking various forms of these kinds of practices for about 8 years now, and bit by bit the anxiety and depression has dissipated, and my life outcomes (career/finances, friendships/relationships and physiological health) have steadily improved and are now doing so at an accelerating rate (though of course there are still ups and downs, with or without macro events like pandemics).
As I look around at all the unrest and widespread mental "illness" in the world, I can easily see links to the distress that so many people feel for all kinds of different specific reasons, but that often boil down to similar patterns: difficulties in childhood (feeling unsafe/unloved/undernourished at home), leading to difficulties getting good social and/or academic outcomes in school, leading to difficulties as people progress into adulthood and try to establish careers, social networks and romantic relationships in a world that can be very hostile to people who don't tick certain boxes.
I'm now quite convinced that the mainstream psychopharmacology industry is a failing effort to paper over the gaping hole in modern society's ability to provide people with the nurturing, confidence and agency needed to build satisfying lives.
From my own experience I'm sure things can be much better, but it will take a major rethink about much of the way we go about supporting people on their life journeys.
Yep, I expected that kind of response, and yep it’s somewhat valid but doesn’t counter my central point.
The wording of the Wikipedia article is that anything considered “alternative medicine” is by-definition “biologically implausible”.
But plenty of what is central to what naturopaths do - i.e., nutrition - is plainly biologically plausible. That naturopaths approach nutrition differently to mainstream dieticians doesn’t make the approach by-definition “implausible”. And the “unproven” herbal remedies they may use are not “implausible” (herbs are made up of molecules and thus can quite obviously influence physiology).
“Unproven” and “implausible” are not the same thing; that’s my central point.
If some naturopaths also practice homeopathy, that doesn’t change the biological plausibility of the nutritional aspect, which in my experience, is the vast majority of the practice (at least here in Australia).
For what it’s worth, your assertion that naturopathy is an umbrella term for those other modalities isn’t correct. Sure, some of them are also homeopaths, but not the majority in my experience. And of course acupuncture is from Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is a separate system again.
Speaking of which, in just the past few years we’ve seen Nobel Prize awarded to a Chinese researcher for “discovering” artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin in the herb sweet wormwood, which had long been used as a malaria remedy. She found this by scouring 1600-year-old Chinese medical texts.
So by Wikipedia’s definition, this remedy was “biologically implausible” right up until the moment someone completed Nobel Prize-winning research to suddenly make it plausible.
Fabulous logic. How lucky the researcher hadn’t read Wikipedia beforehand and learned her proposed research was implausible.
The giveaway on bias is the string "lacks biological plausibility AND". It would be more defensible if the "AND" was instead an "OR".
Plenty of approaches practiced by "alternative" medicine practitioners are biologically plausible, but haven't been tested in randomized controlled trials, because nobody has the incentive or the resources needed to conduct one. (Trials that require many millions of dollars and several years to conduct only happen if a multi-billion dollar return is likely, or if there is a clear and achievable political incentive.)
The most significant category I'm familiar with is emotion/stress-relief-based approaches for treating non-lethal but chronic and debilitating pain/fatigue/inflammatory/autoimmune conditions.
In other discussions here on this site, when I've bothered to fully articulate the basis for the notion that emotional issues and stress can cause these physiological illness, I've found the response to be something like "yeah of course, that's uncontroversial".
And sure, any good mainstream doctor, on recognising their patient is suffering a stress-related illness, will helpfully suggest reducing stress.
But if the patient wants a comprehensive program that can identify and heal all the stress/trauma/held emotion that is keeping them in chronic illness and pain, practitioners that offer this are generally of the kind that is categorised as "alternative" – or, what Wikipedia defines, unconditionally, as "biologically implausible".
Another example is naturopathy, which seeks to improve patients' health mostly through the adoption of an optimal diet and nutrition program. Not much is more biologically plausible than this, but, hey, Wikipedia knows best.
My basis for knowledge on this is over a decade researching and experimenting with approaches to overcome my own chronic illness, finding that those based on emotion and nutrition were the most effective, and finding material from highly-credentialed scientists explaining down to the fundamentals of cell biology, why it is plausible.
As a result, whilst I still turn to Wikipedia routinely as an info source for general topics, I've come to regard it as largely useless for medical topics that veer even slightly from the middle of the road.
I don't think this is right. I understand the basis for thinking it; I've spent much of my adult life accepting or assuming this is how it works. But the more I learn (and I spent a whole lot more time reading scientific papers on the topic this afternoon), the less it holds.
First, the logic assumes the genetic coding for these conditions is never helpful to survival/replication, which as I've pointed out in several other comments, is demonstrably false.
But even if that coding really was never ever helpful, the theory relies on the notion that unhelpful DNA just keeps hanging around on the genome anyway.
Though I can't find a big amount of research on this (particularly regarding humans), there is evidence of "genome streamlining" where genes that serve no purpose get stripped out of the genome. This is necessary because it there is a cost in retaining DNA (continuing to transcribe it and modulate it), so it's far more efficient and thus helpful for survival to remove it.
The main research I've found on this pertains to birds and bats [1] (in which it is particularly important due to the metabolic cost of flying), but it would be reasonable to expect it also happens in primates, including humans, at least to some degree.
I concede this is speculative, but it's compelling.
Even still, the validity of my main point doesn't rely on this being true. We know that most mental "illness" tendencies are sometimes useful for survival/replication. That's what matters most here.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206155949.h...