For a casual reader like me, this idea certainly looks promising. It's a $250 one-time treatment that eliminates the bacteria that's currently in my mouth, which produces lactic acid every time I eat sugar, but it's a strain made to not produce it. (The process is a bit like the “gene drive” proposal of breeding disease-carrying mosquitoes with breeds that don't carry malaria, dengue fever, or other diseases that pose a threat to humans.) But still. When I catch myself reading about Lumina, I feel disoriented. I'm in a position to decide for myself whether it's worth it or is it safe to let new bacteria permanently populate my microbiome (“Once used, they stay in my mouth almost forever”). ” (Alexander wrote). And that leaves us with treatments that are essentially unproven and untested, without traditional reassuring oversight. (Ruxandra Teslow) put it down“Most of the direct data comes from small studies using rats, and well…most humans aren't rats.”)
But this position has become increasingly common, at least in some parts of the internet, especially since the coronavirus has profoundly upended not only our lives and health, but also our epistemological belief structures. Suddenly, groceries were no longer safe, then safe. The park wasn't either, but back then it was. Masks didn't work, but then they worked, and then maybe they didn't. Especially in the early days, guidance seemed to be changing almost on a weekly basis, leading to some people being brave enough to figure it all out on their own, while others were left in a horrifying mess. There were some people. In 2020, there were those who bet against the pandemic on the infamous ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, but there are also those who are touting vitamin D as a countermeasure against the coronavirus, and those who don't want to wait for clinical trial results and instead offer their own versions of vitamin D. There were also people who assembled it. The coronavirus vaccine will be administered in the form of a nasal spray. The pandemic has popularized home testing kits not only for COVID-19 (which, in fact, only became widely available after months of regulatory and messaging hurdles), but also for Lyme disease, It was also about hormone levels, sexually transmitted infections, menopause, vitamin D, DNA sequence, thyroid function, and many other health indicators. By 2021, a majority of states had passed laws restricting public health officials from taking action against future pandemics. In the aftermath of the coronavirus emergency, Ozempic's remarkable rise has become the country's biggest pharmaceutical, and arguably biomedical, story. Technically, the company doesn't even have FDA approval for weight loss (although semaglutide's cousin Wigovy does).
Of course, off-label use is nothing new. Some estimates suggest that up to one-third of prescriptions for common drugs in the United States may be written for a purpose other than their original purpose. And given decades of hostility toward agencies like the FDA and an even longer public fascination with quick fixes, “secret knowledge,” and bogus cures, skepticism about America's medical establishment did not begin with the pandemic. . But no one was satisfied with the course of the pandemic, and everyone wanted to believe it could have been handled better, leading to what my colleague Michelle Goldberg calls “a distrustful public.'' It helped foster a “coalition of distrustful people.'' An anarchic kind of DIY health and wellness dissident, a mixture of disdain for much conventional wisdom and immense faith in the ability of smart people on the internet to do better. Max Reid recently called it “Substackism” on his own Substack.
“Substack's Anti-Awakening Wellness Corner is just one part of a large, loose network of influencers, podcasters, gurus, scientists, pseudoscientists, quacks, nutritionists, and scammers,” Reid said. I wrote this earlier this month. “What unites all of these diverse content creators is not so much any particular level of scientific rigor or expertise (or lack thereof) (sometimes they are absolutely right!) but rather their outsider attitude, that is, distrust of the organization.”
For most Americans, not just those on the right, all of this is not only familiar, but intuitive. In other words, the apparent failures of our public health institutions over the past few years will breed distrust of elite authority. And there were mistakes and mistakes. Early on, it was about testing kits and aerosol spread. About “natural immunity'' and breakthrough infectious diseases in the midst of a pandemic. And in the post-emergency phase, for example, regarding the universal value of paxlobid, recent studies suggest there may be little or no clinical benefit for fully vaccinated people. I am.