My belief on medical interventions (based on many, many examples) is that if you want to claim to be literally the first to try something like “brighter lightboxes”, there’s a good chance you’re wrong and somebody has tried it before. But it’s totally unsurprising for an intervention that would work to have failed to reach as far as your family doctor, if it’s a DIY or intrinsically unprofitable intervention (brighter lightboxes, yes, but also things like vitamins/supplements which nobody could patent). Mild, partly-psychological, or poorly understood medical issues, like SAD or chronic back pain, often do respond to some kind of DIY trick that you don’t get from a doctor.
It would be surprising if you could cure cancer with items purchaseable at a drugstore, though; for major and heavily-studied diseases, usually the only way you could improve over the medical establishment is by being willing to take the risk on an experimental treatment, or sometimes by refusing an unnecessary treatment that’s being prescribed for “defensive medicine” reasons.
My belief on medical interventions (based on many, many examples) is that if you want to claim to be literally the first to try something like “brighter lightboxes”, there’s a good chance you’re wrong and somebody has tried it before. But it’s totally unsurprising for an intervention that would work to have failed to reach as far as your family doctor, if it’s a DIY or intrinsically unprofitable intervention (brighter lightboxes, yes, but also things like vitamins/supplements which nobody could patent). Mild, partly-psychological, or poorly understood medical issues, like SAD or chronic back pain, often do respond to some kind of DIY trick that you don’t get from a doctor.
It would be surprising if you could cure cancer with items purchaseable at a drugstore, though; for major and heavily-studied diseases, usually the only way you could improve over the medical establishment is by being willing to take the risk on an experimental treatment, or sometimes by refusing an unnecessary treatment that’s being prescribed for “defensive medicine” reasons.