alt Hacker NewsI don't really understand where you are going with the fundamentalist vs. empiricist holy war narrative. Medical science is very empiricist, but it is conservative.
Yes they will miss rare cases or where symptoms aren't quantifiable or where no understood biological mechanism exists. Yes you can take on research and treatment yourself with the risk associated. No a bunch of anecdotal evidence on experimental treatments do not substitute for structured research. No you won't come back here in 3 years if you develop serious side effects that would have been identified in clinical trials and tell everyone you were wrong.
’fundamentalist’ has religious connotations which I did not intend, I meant deduction from first principles not foundational orthodoxy. My expression was there was tension not completely discrete factions, there is clearly some empiricism used in medicine. One of the difficulties in getting published is defending a position and it’s easier to do this with a mechanism of action which I think slows things down too much. The pace of progress on my conditions might as well be none at all. Still no cure for a condition that’s been known about since Hippocrates.
So I’ve been doing this for over 4 years now, and commenting on this with this account for a bit less than that, so far no serious unwanted side effects other than the usual ones for semaglutide which went away. Of course that has a survivorship bias but in the forums people do often tell others what they’re about to try and we would notice if they stopped showing up.