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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2424 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 7, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Any of y'all affected by the wildfire smoke: try making a Corsi-Rosenthal box. The name sounds fancy, but it's just a box fan duct-taped to some furnace filters.

Or just toughen the fuck up -- it won't kill you. Have a beer or something.

  • -15

This is not useful, and unnecessarily antagonistic.

I'll cop to the second part, but disagree that it's not useful. Not worrying about trivial crap that's pumped in the media as the literal apocalypse is in fact extremely useful -- particularly so in OPs case, he seems to worry too much and based on his posting here it's a much bigger negative for his QOL than any amount of smoke.

I'm from Western Canada and there's often quite a lot of smoke in the air even when there aren't wildfires -- and we have seasons as bad as what's happening out east (and last year in California) every 4-5 years. It's been like this forever -- just with somewhat lower frequency back when the fire services were better resourced and locals weren't kicked off their places evacuated at the drop of a hat, which cut down on the secondary fires (and structure losses) due to flying embers and such.

If you were really trying to be useful to the OP, you wouldn't put it to him as "toughen the fuck up." If you want to deliver some tough love, be less antagonistic and more sincerely helpful about it.

I've been gradually escalating the toughness of my love, as you will see if you are following his "the only women in my league are 400lb drug addicts, because I am 5'6" and autistic" threads -- if this is a little too tough for this venue that's fine and I will stop, but believe me when I say that more of this kind of thinking would be more helpful to this guy than any amount of sympathetic noises.

I haven't made and don't need one - but there might be people with things like asthma reading this who need them.

Eh, sustained exposure to that level of air quality would cause harm. So e.g. wearing a N95 mask when outside if NY was always like that would be justified. And appealing to linearity - the effort/cost of wearing a mask for a week is something like 1/50th of wearing it for a year (you probably already have one), the harm of breathing it in for a week is probably 1/50th of wearing it for a year, so it's probably worth wearing a mask for the week.

Purchasing a HEPA filter is a good choice anyway IMO, but that or building your own fan-driven filter is a higher fixed cost and less obviously worth it for a single fire than like $10. Toughening up is good for things that don't actually cause long-term impairments - e.g. "I don't feel like exercising" - but isn't a reason to not avoid things that are harmful.

Thing is I'm not overly convinced of the significant long-term harm -- we have seasons like this in Western Canada with some regularity, and have done since time immemorial -- one would think that there'd be an obvious epidemic of respiratory problems here, but it doesn't appear to be the case.

I'm pretty certain of the long-term harm from the air always being like that (like in some south asian cities). So I'd expect the long-term harm from breathing it in for a few days a year to be hard to detect - (made up numbers, there are definitely studies here but idk about the quality) .5% increased risk of lung cancer, .5% reduced lung capacity. It's worth wearing a mask for a few days a year to avoid that, but there won't be an epidemic of it

OK, so assuming people can't actually wear a mask 24/7, I'd like to see some numbers as to the proven impact of masking on this before buying in myself -- but, like, people can go nuts on the masking if they want.

I reserve the right to let these people know they are being a bunch of XXXXXX sillys though.

I haven't ever looked at studies on n95 masks as applied to smoke, because when I put the mask on I can't smell the smoke anymore and that's good enough for me (i know that sometimes something can mask a smell without physically removing the gas/particles but can tell that's not happening here).

This is like 4 minutes of effort, I probably should do more, but https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-020-00267-4

Surgical masks and respirators can provide limited protection for children during wildfire events, with expected decreases of roughly 20% and 80% for surgical masks and N95 respirators, respectively

]. In 2007, 30 half-facepiece masks were tested and the protection was further improved, with 95% of people having <30% of the exposure when wearing any of the respirators in the class [96]. While this amount of protection is likely inadequate for a worker who anticipates high lifetime exposure, in a situation where the general public is trying to temporarily reduce ambient exposure, such as with wildfire smoke, a 66–70% reduction in exposure for nearly everyone may be meaningful. In fact, in a general population cohort of non-fit-tested healthy adults, a crossover study in China found that there was less increase in airway inflammation (measured with exhaled nitric oxide) associated with air pollutant exposure when a study participant wore an N95, compared to wearing a sham N95 mask [103].

Note that 95% <30% doesn't mean the median is 30%, the median would be significantly less than 30%.

And you can (try to) notice when the fit is wrong and letting too much outside air in and adjust it yourself.

Sure, but you're taking an already small exposure (a week or so of smoky air) and reducing it by ~70% or whatever. It kind of reminds me of those "eating bacon increases the risk of <obscure cancer with .01% lifetime risk> by 30%.

That and I'm deeply suspicious of the public health effort to make stuff that was just a part of life 20 years ago into some big hairy deal -- thus my advice to crack a beer and not worry so much.

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