I can’t make a soberly argued for rationalist case for medical analysis because I’m not a doctor or even someone that interested in medicine. I just wanted to share my experience and a heuristic I find useful, and which seems to be missing from many people’s thinking about medicine.
I agree that sometimes finding the external root cause won’t be helpful, as in the case of genetic disorders (aside from stopping you from pursuing other avenues of treatment that won’t help you). But you won’t know whether finding an external root cause will help you until you do it, so in that sense it’s worth doing.
I agree that sometimes finding the external root cause won’t be helpful, as in the case of genetic disorders (aside from stopping you from pursuing other avenues of treatment that won’t help you).
Scurvy is do to the genetic disorder of having a mutated gene for vitamin C synthesis that doesn’t work. Most mammals have it but humans got that genetic disorder evolutionary relatively recently. Scurvy is well treatable by simply consuming Vitamin C.
Something having a genetic origin is no reason to not pursue other avenues of treatment.
If you have genetic disorders where there’s little evolutionary pressure to get rid of them, because the environmental circumstances in which they are a problem are relatively uncommon throughout our evolutionary history, changing the environment can make a lot of sense to deal with them and take vitamin C to cure your scurvy.
That’s a huge problem from your framework that tries to search one root cause. Finding one root cause does not mean that there aren’t other factors at play.
I can’t make a soberly argued for rationalist case for medical analysis because I’m not a doctor or even someone that interested in medicine. I just wanted to share my experience and a heuristic I find useful, and which seems to be missing from many people’s thinking about medicine.
I agree that sometimes finding the external root cause won’t be helpful, as in the case of genetic disorders (aside from stopping you from pursuing other avenues of treatment that won’t help you). But you won’t know whether finding an external root cause will help you until you do it, so in that sense it’s worth doing.
Scurvy is do to the genetic disorder of having a mutated gene for vitamin C synthesis that doesn’t work. Most mammals have it but humans got that genetic disorder evolutionary relatively recently. Scurvy is well treatable by simply consuming Vitamin C.
Something having a genetic origin is no reason to not pursue other avenues of treatment.
If you have genetic disorders where there’s little evolutionary pressure to get rid of them, because the environmental circumstances in which they are a problem are relatively uncommon throughout our evolutionary history, changing the environment can make a lot of sense to deal with them and take vitamin C to cure your scurvy.
In this case I’d say there are a combination of two factors, both outside the body: genetics, and lack of vitamin C in diet.
That’s a huge problem from your framework that tries to search one root cause. Finding one root cause does not mean that there aren’t other factors at play.
This possibility is explicitly mentioned in the article and does not constitute a problem for my framework.