One thing that's overlooked in discussions of health and medicine is the status quo ante of the patient. Like if you’re ostensibly healthy, the only criterion you should have about trying a remedy or treatment is how risky is it?

I’ll experiment with all kinds of supplements, took ivermectin when I had covid because I know all of them are very low risk. Do they help? I really don’t know because I can’t compare myself to the version of me that didn’t take them.

But I didn’t take the mRNA (thank God), and I won’t undergo certain procedures (colonoscopy? no thanks) because there’s real downside if they go wrong. (Plus, it seems psy-oppy to me that men in this society are expected to spread it for a bunch of people in technical garb.)

But if I were in bad shape and had all kinds of health problems, then the possibility of one of these things helping me *might* be worth the risk (still I’d probably just try to get into better shape, and definitely not the mRNA), but you can’t recommend the same treatments for everyone of a certain age, for example, because you’re ignoring this fundamental baseline.

I got mobbed for making this observation on Twitter (well a similar one) 18 months ago, and it was one of the most hilarious and telling back and forths I ever had on that web site. (Seriously, colonosophiles were coming out of the woodwork.)

But that’s a different topic.