Should have gone to a psychoneuroimmunologist… shame it’s such an overlooked and rare specialty; anti-histamines are often quite powerful anticholinergics, especially when combined, and will substantially perturbe autonomic function. Autonomic dysfunction is often a cause for digestive issues, plus a raft of other things. People with these problems typically also have inflammation issues so the doctor may have come to the right conclusion for the wrong reason. Medicine is such a haphazard science that seems to spend the majority of its time gaslighting patients, at least they’re no longer blood letting or literally blowing smoke up peoples butts so thank goodness for small improvements.
Doctors, and by extension much of medicine, are terrible at statistics and the failure to properly use statistics means they constantly overlook otherwise obvious causes. Quite often you’re better off with Dr. Google which implicitly by the nature of the algorithm does use some statistics.
Boswelia, which helped this author, is frankincense. It's extremely reductive to call frankincense "an antihistamine"...
There is a rich medical tradition of using frankincense for myriad treatments.
Over the last two years I've gotten into gardening in a serious way. I have about a hundred species of plants growing now, and another three hundred fifty or so waiting for Spring.
Coming from a sciencey computer nerd background I have to say, plants are incredible. For one thing, they are very intelligent and adaptable. They have senses we don't fully understand. Together with fungi and microbes in soil they form LANs that administer large areas of the Earth and adjust environmental conditions to suit themselves. Seriously, look at living things as nanotechnology and you realize we are in (and of) a kind of living fractal cathedral of information and life.
Anyway, before I get too lyrical, my point is that plants produce myriad chemical substances that have effects on your metabolism. We are all familiar (if only by reputation) with the heavy hitters: Coffee, Coca, Cacao, Cannabis, (lotta C's) Tobacco, etc. But there are thousands of species of plants that produce innumerable substances that are essentially medicines: chemicals that have a stereotypical effect on metabolism.
It's entirely reasonable and unsurprising that some plant, such as Boswellia sacra, the sap of which is the source of frankincense, could have such an effect.
A well-stocked garden/forest is a medicine cabinet.
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As the author points out, it behooves us to "do science to it", eh?
When FitBit-style wearable medical monitoring devices become commonplace we're going to have a wealth of data to correlate, at least in theory.
People will encounter the same kind of issue in Psychiatry. Because neuro-science is not advanced enough.
Quite an interesting article.
That affiliate link in the article made this much harder to trust. Wonder if ChatGPT could generate articles like this, just to put some product at the center of story.
That being said, 33% of doctors I've dealt with follow a simple heuristic[1], which makes paying for those visits so much more annoying. But it is worth it when I find a specialist that legitimately ends up helping.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost...
Armchair thought that the author never brought up - food with high protein “tasted gross” per author, until starting what they thought provided anti histamine activity. I know that if I have a stuffed nose from cold or allergy, I also find that food tastes miserable, because sense of smell is so important in human perception of taste.
Previous (small) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257944
I must admit I only scanned the article but when I started reading I thought, "Hmmm, gut pain and nobody knows what to do, bet the author is female," and scrolled back up to check and sure enough. This has been my experience with my daughter's complex health issues - including some absolutely horrible experiences with gastroenterologists in particular. (We're in Australia, BTW.)
ALL (drug) medicine is luck based. Even antibiotics have their non-responders.
Best to avoid doctors and make educated self-tests after internet/Google Scholar search.
So the author was “prescribed” a cocktail of 5 supplements, found they could eat more protein afterward, and then assumed that Boswelia was the solution? Did I miss something, or did they just assume 1 of the 5 supplements was the solution?
This entire post is a good example of how post-facto reasoning can take over in the space of anecdotal medical changes. The author doesn’t even seem to realize that Boswelia is a notable anti-microbial, which is a nontrivial factor when considering gut issues and potential microbiome changes. Several supplements are potent antimicrobials against the microbiome, some on par with prescription antibiotics. I wouldn’t be surprised if the combination of 5 supplements the doctor prescribed simply nuked their microbiome from orbit and it happened to come back in a somewhat healthier combination. There is precedent for this in controlled studies, but results are very mixed.
The SlimeTimeMoldTime blog they (rightly) criticize is another example of post-facto reasoning taking over at the intersection between “rationality blogging” and medicine: We’ve known for a long time that monotonous diets like potato diets result in weight loss. It’s not magic, it’s just that potatoes are boring and bland and you’re going to eat less food if much of your diet is potatoes. Yet the rationalist community has been doing mental backflips to try to come up with a more complicated explanation for why this might be the case.
My experience with western medicine has been very black and white. Either you're completely broken and it's so obvious what's wrong with you that you barely need a doctor, or you're partially broken in which case doctors know very little and rely on experience, murky clues, and their gut.
This made sense once I realized doctors know much less about the human body then they pretend to. Not only is our understanding of physical health far less "advanced" than advertised, but the system is far too complex for any one doctor to comprehend. Medicine is far from the only field in which this is the case.
Computers have become too complex for any one engineer to understand in full. Leadership has always had this quality. These are fairly obvious, but I wonder if most (all?) domains of life share this. Consider the recent discovery that the varnish used on Stradivarius violins gave them their amazing sound. Hundreds of years ago, this was almost certainly discovered through luck or intuition.
In contrast to the author, I find joy in this. Not only does it reveal boundless territory waiting to be explored and discovered, but it gives meaning and purpose to being human since no technology comes close, or perhaps will ever come close, to matching the extraordinary abilities of human intuition.