Comment Policy For Selfhacked (May 2016)

There has been an update to the commenting policy for Selfhacked.  I used to allow pretty much all comments, but not any more.

Comments that add value will be approved.  If it doesn’t add value, I won’t approve it.

This is because people sign up for email updates to comments and if I approve irrelevant comments or long rants that don’t add value, it spams people’s emails and it discourages people from reading comments.

Selfhacked is about giving people the information and tools they need to upgrade/heal themselves, as affordably as possible.

I started Selfhacked.com because I didn’t like the dogma that other blogs had.   People are often narrow-mindedly fixated on certain ideas and approaches.  I found bloggers who identified in a certain way (either paleo, vegan or any other group) were closed minded to ideas outside of their ideology.

If you notice, the only ideology of selfhacked is to see what works for you.

I also didn’t like how most blogs are filled with marketing, hype and false hope.  Even well meaning people often lack critical thinking.

I try to be extremely open-minded and willing to try anything, but I’m also highly skeptical and take a critical look upon everything.

Accordingly, I don’t fit into any category: I’m not “paleo”, low carb, low fat or anything else for that matter.  I do what works for me and I encourage people to do what works for them, but try out many approaches.  By identifying with a group, I find it introduces group think and mental blockages.  It feels good, but it shuts the mind down.

What irked me the most was when people were convinced that what worked for them must work for everyone else.  I think everyone is different and it’s important to isolate these differences and understand why  people react differently.

Hence, my role is to supply information so that you can then conduct your own experiments and see what works for you.

You can connect by liking the Selfhacked facebook page.

Contributors

Since March 2016, Selfhacked posts have been written by team efforts, so I don’t put any specific writers down.  Before that, all of the posts were written by me.

The contributors consist of myself, science PhD’s, masters in science, biology college grads and selfhackers.

Goal of Selfhacked

My purpose here at Selfhacked is to introduce cutting-edge ideas to upgrade the human condition.  I think people have a right to feel great in mind, body and ‘spirit’.

Current technology has made this more possible than ever before.    Whether you have a chronic issue, disease or just feel you want to improve some aspect about yourself, you’re in the right place.

I combine attitudes, principles and knowledge from Science, Quantified-self and Buddhism.

My overarching philosophy is to simplify and achieve more with less.

In forming ideas, I look to traditional and cultural knowledge, mechanistic studies, animal studies, human studies, expert opinions, anecdotes and my own experimental results.  I prefer large, double-blind placebo controlled trials.

I don’t recycle the same old garbage as other blogs do.   I offer unique, creative and effective solutions.

I’m not committed to using only “natural” solutions, but for various reasons, natural is often better (but not always).

I favor a self-hacking approach where I provide the information and you experiment with various changes to see if they work for you.   Personal experience trumps any science with regard to your health.  Science can only say what works for a given set of people.

Selfhacking is the process by which I healed and upgraded myself.  This approach, combined with good information,  can be used by everyone to feel optimal.

Individual Approach is Key

Why This Blog Is Important

A comprehensive study done in 2013 looked at 702 occupations and found that 47% are at risk of being computerized (R). These are the jobs with less cognitive demand.

Even if your job doesn’t disappear, cognitive performance will dictate how successful you are.  Intelligence has always been important for the modern economy, but as technology advances and takes away repetitive jobs, we have to up our skills.

As technology develops, economies become more competitive and more reliant on higher intellectual ability.  Simultaneously, we have  many technologies to improve performance that we never had before.

Every year, we have greater access to new technologies that is allowing people to heal themselves better than ever before . Access to information is also unprecedented.

Think about how much the internet has developed in the past 15 years.  Scientific studies are increasing at an incredible rate.  Devices like LLLT, for example, are ubiquitous and cheap.  The number of dietary supplements hitting the market is also astounding.  For example, 5 years ago it was impossible to get C60 and now multiple vendors sell it.  There are so many supplements that have been improved such as longvida curcumin.  There’s perhaps 10 different types of bioavailable curcumin, whereas 15 years ago the supplement probably didn’t exist in the marketplace.  The supplements that were available were much more expensive as well. Quality control in the industry has also gotten better, especially after the passing of GMP laws.

Drug developments have also been promising.  Blood, genetic and other kinds of tests have been developed and become significantly cheaper.

These breakthroughs will only increase in time and maybe even accelerate (as long the government doesn’t over-regulate like they did with 23andme).  We are at an exciting time period and you don’t have to be rich to take advantage of the technology we have in the 21st century to upgrade yourself.

The Problem with Doctors

I must say it’s unfortunate that today’s medical doctors don’t begin to understand the full range of options because it simply wasn’t taught to them and they usually aren’t enterprising enough to read the literature directly.

The medical system selects for a specific type of person.  This person will be good at memorizing lots of information and diligent in studying it, without selecting for people who actually know how to apply it properly and think outside the box.   And if these doctors did think out of the box, this litigious society would sue the sh*t out of them.

Most doctors go to school for a long time and then just see patients afterward without being proactive in constantly learning new information.  If a doctor went to med school 10 years ago, they are clueless about all of the studies that came out in the past 10-15 years.

The few doctors who do read the literature directly are stifled by an ultra-conservative philosophy that if something isn’t studied and replicated by massive double blind, placebo controlled trials (which only the drug companies can afford) and published in prestigious journals then it has absolutely no value.

Instead of looking at problems with a risk/benefit analyses they are stifled by their parochial view. On the other hand,  there’s way too much dogma and quackery in the alternative health sphere.

Don’t get me wrong – the doctors aren’t the problem.  Most of them are normal well-meaning people.  I just think the system is broken.  The medical system is dominated by bureaucracy.  Instead of going to school for 10 years and completely stopping like it’s done now, it would make more sense to go to school for a few years and thereafter go to school for 3 months out of the year for the rest of their lives.

There’s obviously a lot more problems, but it’s out of the scope of this post.

The Multi-Factorial Nature of Disease

I think the nature of disease is woefully misunderstood.

The usage of drugs by conventional medicine indicates an approach to disease that is highly targeted.  For some diseases that happen because of a very specific cause, this is a good approach, but  for chronic disease, it’s usually not optimal or effective.

This is simply because chronic disease – whether it be depression, anxiety, cancer, obesity, schizophrenia or heart disease- has multiple causes that contribute to the disease.

Multiple things need to go wrong in the body by the time we realize something is seriously wrong.  The body is good at adapting when one or two things go awry.

These multifactorial diseases can’t successfully be treated with a drug that only addresses one of the issues.

In practice, this is what’s called treatment resistance – a continuation of disease despite one or more treatments.

You see, when one factor in the body goes awry, the body adjusts through homeostasis and tries to work around the imbalance to function normally.  When multiple things go bad, a new homeostasis is created and at that stage even if someone tries to fix one of the underlying issues, the body will get back to its new diseased homeostatic state.

We see this with every chronic disease.  This is why it’s so hard to treat any chronic disease and most of our attempts are futile.  We can give drugs for depression but it barely makes a dent.  There might be a small decrease in depression for a few weeks, but after a few months depression takes hold again.

Cancer chemotherapy drugs are often clinically insignificant because cancer comes about as result of multiple dysfunctions.  Once it takes root, it’s the new homeostasis.  I don’t think herbs or alternative medicine is the cure, either.  A combination of drugs, herbs, diet, lifestyle and various new technologies to kill the tumor more specifically is the best bet.

If one is in a diseased state, they must attack it from multiple angles that address all of the underlying causes of the disease.  Some of these causes we aren’t aware of yet, but our knowledge is progressing quickly and we learn more daily.

Finesse and balance are required for attacking the disease in multiple ways.   If one treatment is targeted too much, as is the case of many drugs, an imbalance will occur and the person may have side effects that are worse than the disease itself.  So the treatment must target every cause significantly but not so much that it causes tremendous harm to the body.

One must always remember , though, that any treatment – diet, exercise, supplements or anything else – always comes with a trade-off.

The older someone is the less wiggle-room they have and their condition becomes significantly  harder to treat.  I view chronic disease mostly as just a manifestation of aging, where we eventually succumb to one diseased state or another if we live to be old enough.

In this paradigm, there is no “cure” for a disease, only a slowing of its progression.  So if you see me use the word “cure”, realize that what I really am saying is a temporary reversal,  which can last a long time if the person is young enough.

Citation Policy

If something isn’t cited and I don’t specify that it’s my opinion call me out on it in the comments section and ask for a reference.  If I can’t find the source, I’ll erase the sentence.

Comments Policy

I try to answer everyone, but sometimes I don’t.  If the question requires a one or two word answer I am much more likely to answer it.   If it requires a long explanation I usually don’t answer the question.

Although I’ll approve your comment, if you make a statement and it’s not common knowledge, you should back it up with studies.