The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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What do Mottizens think of the CIRS research aka the hypothesis that fungus and mold in poorly built buildings causes a lot of chronic pain, depression, and other issues?
https://www.vc4hw.com/chronic-inflammatory-response-syndrome-cirs.html
I listened to podcast of Jordan Peterson interviewing some doctors about it a few months back (https://youtube.com/watch?v=F2RnK23AWUE)
It seemed pretty far fetched, and also just not very useful (like most of Peterson's health stuff -- I like him in general, but his whole family has super weird health issues and opinions). The conclusion seemed to be something like that people with chronic health issues should do some kind of complicated alternative healthcare regime, and also move into a completely new house or something.
Yeah this is where I heard it to. And yeah not very actionable sadly.
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If the question is simply whether these factors exist and are harmful in certain contexts, then I don't think anyone can deny that. However, I think anyone claiming that they are responsible for an increase in depression or chronic health conditions over time is incorrect, as homes have gotten substantially cleaner and better ventilated over the past century in most countries and the general shittiness everyone seems to feel these days has alternative psychological and sociological explanations that others have outlined downthread.
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Shit Life Syndrome is real. People live poverty stricken, directionless, crime-ridden lives fueled by crap food, alcohol and drugs, with little positive social interaction. This causes psychic pain, which turn becomes mental health problems and psychosomatic pain. People with shit lives are probably very commonly found living in poorly built buildings infested with mold and fungus.
I'm half convinced that the vast majority of pain that doesn't have an apparent cause is psychosomatic.
I was about to comment the same thing. With that, having lived in a really shitty apartment (I underestimated how bad it would be; the difference was between "crappy, but manageable" and "total shithole".), it was profoundly depressing in a way that's hard to explain.
The building was old, and in a swampy area, so the inside air was permanently humid irrespective of AC use. There was plenty of mold, but I don't think that was the particular issue. My problem was that it was impossible to clean/keep clean for any length of time due to old floors, counters, etc. Pest control was nonexistent/ineffective aggravated by an especially nasty next door neighbor, so the place was overrun by roaches, mice, and ants. The neighbors were loud, and sound insulation nonexistent. My upstairs neighbors would do laundry in the bathtub and spill water all over the place, leading to water leaks in my unit and eventually the ceiling collapsing in the bathroom. Rent was cheap, but I spent tons of money in bars just trying to stay away from home, and it was poorly insulated so power bills during winter were insane while I still froze. It felt like living in a slum. I didn't develop chronic pain but became badly depressed.
I wound up moving elsewhere and paying the remainder of the lease just to spare myself the misery of living there.
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Yeah I’m actually more on the psychosomatic pain train myself. It’s a sort of terrifying prospect when you consider just how wrong our understanding of pain is.
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I only really see this possibly as a trigger for developing self sustaining chronic conditions given that people don't seem to get better by moving.
I doubt this has much general explanatory power or delivers much if any insight into possible treatments.
It seems to me that numerous things could plausibly be the cause of the same, or sufficiently similar, conditions through different pathways. Perhaps some get autoimmune issues/nervous system dysregulation through exposure to fairly normal levels of environmental contaminants while others get it through ordinary virus infections, who knows and who really cares? It doesn't seem like very useful information, since the underlying cause no longer seems to matter or was that bad in the first case.
Perhaps some tiny group has really awful mold problems and that really is the entire cause and solution. If you have a mold problem you should fix that regardless but i wouldn't hold out hope for some major improvement in your chronic issues.
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For pretty much any chronic disease that kind of looks like just being a lie-about, I would be more inclined to believe it if someone could show me an afflicted individual that doesn't seem like they were deeply neurotic, quite fat, or just generally frail prior to getting the putative disease.
Not strictly responsive to this thread, but I know a former hotshot superintendent and iirc sub-2:50 marathoner, generally regarded as an exceptionally hard son of a bitch within the relevant communities, who was pretty much an invalid for a couple years and out of the game for a decade or so due to chronic Lyme. Certainly moved the needle for my own risk assessment there.
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Well I'd be happy to talk to you about it, given that I've suffered from this sort of thing for a while and don't see myself as having any of those traits. Of course I may be wrong.
That being said, you really think over 25% of the U.S. population has those characteristics? And even if they did, why would this still not be a problem?
Much more than 25% of the US population is obese, yes.
I mostly just don't look for alternate explanations for people's poor health when I can look at them and easily observe that their poor health is a product of eating too much and moving around too little. I've never met someone that was a cross-country runner or hobby cyclist or Crossfit enthusiast or powerlifter or mixed-martial artist that informs me that they got laid up after they moved into the wrong building. I'm sure there are genuine sufferers of idiosyncratic illnesses of autoimmunity, post-viral syndromes, and fungal infections, but as sweeping explanations for the poor health of Americans, I think these add little to the story. I wouldn't dismiss an individual, stuff happens, but I am pretty skeptical of these oddball diseases having more explanatory power.
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Personally I think it's bunk. Even in this link there is a link to a consultant who will presumably provide some monetized advice / relief to the afflicted. Show me the multiple studies supporting this hypothesis and I'll consider it.
Whenever these kind of vague "syndromes" involving many complex systems are quantified as X thing caused by Y, my bullshit meter goes off.
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