Yes, and this is one reason why eczema is correlated with allergies, because it allows allergens to pass through the skin more readily. And it's probably also a reason why babies put everything in their mouths; they're training their immune systems.
Generate a miasma of benign pestilence in your child's crib, mimicking the protective inoculations provided by early exposure to peanuts and other potential allergens, "farm" air, and the like. It could be packaged with Flonase for sneezing parents and an 'essential oils' scent dispenser to cover the barnyard smell.
Use AI to tailor the precise blend of aerosolized rodent feces and tree nut dust to optimize your child's immune system, and et voila: funding!
Bizarre that this is the top comment as this would drastically increase the frequency of peanut allergies and, more than likely, end in multiple deaths. Research strongly suggests that the key is that the child eats peanuts before being exposed via other vectors (skin/lung) to avoid allergic reactions. Arisolizing the relevant proteins around infants is essentially fast tracking allergic reactions.
> Research strongly suggests that the key is that the child eats peanuts before being exposed via other vectors (skin/lung) to avoid allergic reactions.
Funnily enough, one of the things we were recommended was a pack of mini nut butter jars. Made specifically for the purpose of being a easy way to expose little ones to a variety of nuts before they could eat the nuts themselves.
Then at each meal put a tiny amount on a spoon and give to the little one before feeding the actual meal, and each meal use the next one butter.
It was great. Sure I can buy peanut butter, or maybe cashew at a grocery store. But I've never seen pecan butter, Brazil nut butter etc.
My wife and I were always going to feed our child anything and she’s liked eating food off our plate anyway since she was 6 months old or so, but it was something we considered. So far the only thing we haven’t given her is shellfish.
I smirked at the parent comment, and it didn't even slightly occur to me that someone might interpret its intent as serious and literal until I saw your comment.
As far as I can tell, there's no level of satire so heavy-handed and unsubtle that it won't get a reply taking it seriously. If anything, the more obviously ridiculous your suggestion, the more urgently HNers want to disagree.
Yeah, I don't think "surely no one seriously believes this" is viable now, if it was before. Of course, what you choose to do with that conclusion is still up to you.
I've been on the internet a long time. There are enough weirdos out there to make you understand humor doesn't scale, and it definitely doesn't scale across cultures.
Things are different when you actually know people but we killed that when we killed forums.
The "non-ingestion allergen exposure" thing is a dangerous and common misconception, and the business-idea "joke" doesn't hinge on knowing or recognizing this, nor does it encourage questioning that part of the premise.
I think it’s actually a pretty good comment. Most people would not know that skin and food exposure are different. This is something you are told as a parent though. E.g. My daughter had a skin reaction to (chicken) eggs at week 29 but tolerates them just fine as food and we were not particularly concerned but if no one had told us I would have thought it was a problem.
It is not bizarre, this place is like reddit or the news. Things seem plausible, until once in a while the discussion is something in your area of expertise, then you realise how full of shit everyone is.
At least here we have some exceptions, with some deeply knowledgeable people. But to offset that we have software "engineer" hubris.
This is needs consumer staying power in order to secure the funding. I recommend selling the blends in DRM locked plastic pods and have the device only be operable from a mobile app. The mobile app's purpose would be to gamify the aerosol dispensation by grading it on timeliness, targeted direction and force of the spray, as well as streaks that get posted to social media for a sense of foamo.
Or Israeli: Israel presents a unique experiment because you have people from different genetic populations from different parts of the world collecting in Israel(eg Sephardic jews from Spain, Ashkenazi from central Europe, Mizrahi from Asia, etc).
Something interesting is that peanut allergies in Israel are far lower than for Jews living in Spain, central europe, etc...
One of the most popular snacks in Israel? Bambas - peanut butter puffs.
My son has a peanut allergy. He was deemed very severe. He started treatment daily peanut doses. Starting at 5 mg. He is now eating 4 peanuts a day and counting. Zero issues with exposure now. If you have a kid with a peanut allergy find an allergist who will desensitize them.see https://www.palforzia.com/
Do be careful, though. My nephew (now 4 years old) has/had several food allergies. Some he's ok with now, but for some the desensitizing process resulted in several ER visits.
Common sense thinking wins again. The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it. The #1 way to precipitate this is to keep the body from ever encountering this particle until well beyond its initial phases of immune development.
Are there other modern conditions born from the same "zero-tolerance prevention leads to unintended consequences due to failing to provide the body a robust means to develop"?
I don't know that I agree this is the reasoning, here? Seems far more likely, to me, that there are other environmental factors at play.
I'm almost certainly indexing too heavily on the ideas in birch pollen cross reactivity. But I see basically no reason not to think that same process generalizes quite well into a lot of the things we used to gladly pollute into our environments.
And yes, I know we can still get better at pollution management; but I think people should probably acknowledge just how much progress we have made. Especially in the US. Our air quality is amazingly clean today compared to just 60 years ago. Strikingly so.
> The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it
And why the body does not recognize it ? Because it is tainted. Putting all kind of pesticides and other substances on plants does modify the "original".
Have there been any studies on crop-swapping changes such as legumes <--> cotton? Only asking as there were some theories about excess herbicides and pesticides from cotton leeching into the ground and getting absorbed in high amounts by legumes from seasonal crop-swaps.
I attribute to my robust immune system to the amount of dirt I ate as a child, I was a digger in the school yard, and I liked playing in mud - while being a thumb sucker well into elementary school.
Most peanut allergies are noticed during infancy. Advising infants eat more dirt is probably not a good solution to reducing peanut allergies on the whole.
I know you're being facetious but I wanted to say, a friend of mine's kid recently got diagnosed with elevated lead levels in his blood, likely caused by eating contaminated dirt from their backyard. So... test before you try it, I guess?
My kids love to play in sand, and one time I found my kid playing with "rocks" in the sand before realizing it was a favorite shitting ground for the neighborhood cats
My oldest is allergic and spent plenty of time in the sand and dirt. They were exposed to nuts pretty regularly, and fed small amounts from basically as soon as they were taking solid foods.
The hygiene hypothesis is widely accepted, including by allergists, and there's definitely data supporting it, but we don't understand the mechanism, so it's hard to say that it's about any one specific thing vs. many contributing causes that correlate with hygiene and other aspects of the environment around the kid.
The advice about early exposure clearly works though, and there's data to support that early exposure even after confirming the allergy can increase the chances of outgrowing the allergy.
Now we do understand why allergies appear, or at least we have theories that are being tested with studies such as this one. It's all about chance, very literally.
As lymphocytes are formed, they randomly rearrange their T-cell receptor / immunoglobulin genes, creating a random antigen specificity for each cell. [1]
Then, they get selectively killed if they react to self-antigens. [2]
Those that survive, if they ever meet their specific antigen, will selectively multiply [3] and do random mutations again [4].
The current theory is that allergies appear if: (1) some random lymphocyte rearrangement created affinity for that allergen and (2) the allergen was not "known to be safe" by the selection mechanisms of the body and that lymphocyte was allowed to survive.
Always a good reminder that absolutism is dangerous. The medical field especially seems subject to this. It took me an insane number of years and multiple doctors and nearly being disabled from it to discover my thyroid condition in large part because "statistically it's mostly women who have thyroid issues" and the monstrously large range of "normal levels of TSH"
> I don't think there are any physics reasons why it'd be impossible
There is extensive evidence that the incidence of severe peanut allergies is significantly increased by the practice of avoiding early exposure in the absence of particular risk indicators, which is why that practice is now advised against.(IIRC, some of the first targeted studies were motivated by observed differences in incidence between the US where early avoidance had become common and Israel where peanut-based puff snacks were a common thing to give to babies not long after starting solid food.)
That reminds me of my parents who most often use peanut oil for cooking. I was eating food cooked in peanut oil every day. I was astounded when I heard in elementary school that people could be allergic to peanuts.
There are proteins left in raw pressed peanut oil (used for lower heat cooking and as a finishing oil, somewhat similar to EVOO), but not in highly-refined peanut oil (typically used for high-heat cooking/deep frying.)
Both will eventually go rancid at room temperature , though highly refined oil has a longer shelf life (both sealed and, even moreso, after the seal is broken.)
My brother was/is allergic to peanuts, and it was first noticed in ... 1978 I think, when he was 2. Horrible reaction, nearly died. I'm older, don't have it. A brother younger than both of us also has no allergy to peanuts. We were all raised in the same house, same foods, no bubble environment (the 70s were pretty unbubbled for most kids).
He also had a grape allergy, and reaction was quite severe, but he seemed to outgrow that by his 40s.
Right, allergies are likely a real thing, but I think there's many things nowadays where as soon as we hear of chances of something we go on this hyper vigilant avoidant mode, and that often makes the chances even greater, counterintuitively.
At some points, some things are bad luck, at least until we truly understand the mechanisms and causations.
Fortunately for food allergies, oral immunotherapy seems to be very effective if you can catch the allergy early (before 2 years old). We did for our oldest and the results are miraculous. It's a ton of work though, and I had more than a few near crash-outs from trying to get an 18 month old who doesn't really like the taste of peanut to eat a teaspoon of peanut every single day. That said, I don't regret it.
Even though we keep an epipen around and we make sure they're not eating peanuts, we don't practice strict avoidance anymore, we don't have to worry about the "processed on shared equipment" warnings, and there's no problem if he touches/inhales/eats peanut, meaning we can eat peanuts around him.
I haven't searched through the literature, but these days pediatrician advice is to try to do early and regular exposure to all of the common food allergens as soon as they are ready to start solid foods (~6 month mark), if not even a little earlier in their milk/formula.
Europe is as much a location as the US. Eating habits in Finland are very different than in Spain. So any generalisation here will have people disagreeing. That said, I are lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. It was normal.
My first is allergic to peanuts and I don't think she lived in a bubble but she was born in late 2020 so probably a relative bubble compared to normal times. She was 8mo when she first had a lick of peanut butter, no other allergies and we quickly followed up with tree nut butter to head off anything else.
My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.
You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.
Peanut allergies is one of those things I have only seen in American pop culture and media. Like anxious kids breathing in a brown paper bag.
I know people have peanut allergies all over the world. But the significance of the allergy is definitely different in the US than most other places imo.
In the U.S., the rate of childhood peanut allergies more than tripled between 1997 and 2008.
...
In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a (now-outdated) recommendation in 2000, which directed parents to avoid feeding baby peanuts until they reached the age of three, especially if a baby was at high risk for a peanut allergy.
But when these recommendations to delay feeding peanut were introduced, there was no study to support these recommendations. Rather, they were just based on physicians' guesses.
As Dr. Spergel explains, "Back then, we gave people really bad advice. We told people to avoid food allergens... But there was never any evidence for this. It was just based on a few physicians’ best guess. There's never been any study that ever proved that food avoidance worked. "
Today, we know that this approach to delay peanut introduction actually increases food allergy risk, and that delayed introduction was a major factor that led to the sharp increase in peanut allergies.
My son's daycare in Australia doesn't allow peanuts or eggs due to allergy management concerns so I don't think this is an American thing? I had a friend in high school who had a peanut allergy and had an epipen.
"breathing into a brown paper bag"? An anaphylatic reaction is literally a life-threatening event requiring prompt medical intervention. It's not "anxiety".
The brown paper bag [1] was not connected to the peanut allergy, it was mentioned as an example of another thing that only (to OP) seems to happen/be a thing in the US.
In which case it's even more weird because again: an anaphylactic shock is a life-threatening event that will kill you without prompt medical intervention. The epipen is _literally_ just to keep you alive long enough to get to the hospital.
And funnily enough, the breathing in a paper bag is _absolutely_ a recommended treatment for anxiety attacks by doctors. My father is one, and had my wife do it when she had a panic attack during a particularly rough airplane landing recently.
So again: it's a standard and normal thing, which is in the regular medical parlance.
The reason to do it is your trigger to breathe is based on CO2 acidity, not oxygen - you can't detect O2 (hence why inert gas asphyxiation is a huge hazard) but can detect CO2. But if you start shallow breathing very rapidly you end up in feedback loop. Rebreathing the air ups the CO2 content, which encourages the body to take deeper breathes, which in turn helps with the anxiety and ensures you do get enough oxygen (since you can wind up passing out, and low O2 wipes out the reasoning center of thought very quickly).
In any given conversation, there is a specific floor level in which you would jump out the window to escape.
This is a 1.5 floor level conversation. It’s not even a conversation, really — you’ve assumed we’re all having a homogenous argument about the validity of the epipen and the brown paper bag, and you’re informing us of our wrongness about something we do not even assert.
But the worst part of it is, you’ve replaced the original poster with me, replying to my comment — which was merely intended to correct a harmless misunderstanding you’ve made — as though I posted the original thought.
What is it you expect me to reply with here? A defense thesis for the original poster? An acceptance that the original poster’s opinion is crushed because of the science you supposedly brought to the table?
I have no doubt that whatever response you have cooking up now will turn this into a 2nd floor one. I’ll be on my way while I can make a soft safe landing, but good luck with whatever it is you hoped to do here.
Perhaps in the format of linear conversation the response was not directed at you but simply continuing the train of thought of the original with respect to the original poster.
One of my conspiracy theories that I loosely hold is that the majority of the fears that we have been sold on allergies was a direct result of marketing efforts by the inventors of the Epipen.
Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. And even in cases of anaphylactic shock, it's only fatal in an even rarer number of cases (which makes sense, anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself).
We really don't know how many lives emergency epinephrine has saved, but it may have only been necessary in less than 1 out of 50 cases. However, it benefitted the manufacturer to overemphasize the prevalence of dangerous food allergies and the risks of shock and encourage doctors to prescribe them in increasingly more "just in case" cases".
It's in this world that parents and doctors alike became insanely cautious and paranoid about introducing allergens. Conveniently, we saw the rise of simpler, more highly processed baby and childrens' foods at the same time.
I could get onboard with your theory that Epipens are overused (or at least over prescribed). But I really don't agree that when someone can't breath we should "wait and see because it's the body trying to save itself", though.
Children of Gen X and Millenials have been ruined by their helicopter/bubble parents, they have allergies and that's that. Future generations can and must learn from their mistake, but we can't force allergic people to simply grow out of it. We're not talking itchy throats here.
It's partly due to certain doctors deciding to tell parents NOT to give peanuts to kids until much later. Even after peanut allergies spiked 3x, they wouldn't change their recommendation - until they had studies to prove the recommendation they were giving was wrong (which they based on no study, "let's try banning peanuts for toddlers...").
My inclination is to say it is all hypochondria, that it's a slander against peanut farmers, etc. I know a lot of women, for instance, who don't like insects and are terrified that they might get stung by a bee or a hornet because they don't know if they are allergic to stings because they've never been stung.
On the other hand, I've seen kids have a bad reaction to peanuts and the tiniest dose can be dramatically dangerous.
I think of how allergies to wheat were fashionable before COVID but seem to have been forgotten about in all the confusion. Now there is such as thing as a wheat allergy and I know people who eat the tiniest amount of gluten and their GI tract purges everything in both directions. I know about 10x as many people who have vague symptoms such as "bloating" or nonspecific fatigue who get told by an alternative health practitioner to go gluten free... and instead of eating traditional preparations of other cereals and pseudo-cereals (e.g. a bowl of rice) they seem to think life begins with sandwiches and ends with baked goods and eat nothing but sawdust "bread".
The bloating and non-specific fatigue you mention are symptoms of Celiac disease or gluten insensitivity.
Rather than go to an alternative health practitioner people should just go to an actual doctor and ask them to schedule a blood test. It's an easy thing to test for, so if the doctor won't do it then find another doctor or just go to a lab.
I agree with your point about eating traditional preparations of grains being less problematic and many people seemingly not thinking about that at all for some reason even when they run into problems.
But, I think it may go a step further than that. If we zoom out on the timeline to the span of human evolution, eating grass seeds as a significant part of the diet is very, very, very strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if some human subpopulations, especially those who adopted agriculture later on, aren’t suited to eating grass seeds at all. And I’m just thinking about within European subpopulations. There were people roaming around the steppe when others were long settled. And beyond even that, the population increase enabled by wheat et al could plausibly produce a large enough competitive advantage for the group that some individuals having tummy problems probably would not register much on the selection pressure meter back in those days.
I’ve come around to the idea that wheat sensitivity is probably real. I used to be quite skeptical also. I think if you told someone 30,000 years ago that the earth would be full of people eating mainly grass seeds, they would find the idea completely ridiculous.
Most gluten sensitivities aren't allergies. There is no histamine reaction.
In a lot of cases patients who think they have a gluten intolerance are actually having a bad reaction to one of the many other chemicals that typically come along with gluten. They can test this by consuming pure food-grade gluten with nothing else (not medical advice, check with your doctor).
We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't. The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the Epipens do: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10811...
> Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.
How so? Bringing awareness to risk in general makes people more cautious. Advertising crime rates in your town to sell you a security system will overall make people feel less secure.
> We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't
An EpiPen is not a cure, and you are told that if you use an EpiPen you should also go to the hospital. An EpiPen essentially keeps you alive long enough to receive care.
> The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the EpiPens do
If you have anaphylaxis without an EpiPen, the first thing the ambulance/ER will do is almost certainly inject epinephrine.
I really encourage you to ask a doctor. It is not enough to read papers and draw conclusions without understanding the broader context. I am not a doctor, but have talked to a doctor about carrying an EpiPen.
> The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings
Again, could this be because there is such abundant access to life saving medication, that you are arguing against?
> Again, could this be because there is such abundant access to life saving medication, that you are arguing against?
I'm not at all arguing that Epipens don't save lives or that doctors shouldn't prescribe them or that you shouldn't carry one.
Let me reframe my argument: Crime is a real risk no matter where you live in this country. But we should not be surprised that people that sell you security are incentivized to scare you about the risk of crime or its randomness.
I would not say people shouldn't take whatever precautions they need against crime, but don't think it's controversial to say the risk is overstated.
It's easy enough to say that never stepping outside of your house because crime exists is a silly conclusion to make. But people for some reason thought it was completely normal to deprive children of exposure to large swaths of the food pyramid despite no underlying history or diagnosis because a risk was overstated to them.
Still, I am admitting that my targeting of Epipens in particular something of a crackpot argument. But also we live in a world still reeling from the effects of the Sackler family and the marketing they used on the medical industry - would it be that far fetched if we learned in 20-30 years that the life saving ability of emergency epinephrine was overstated for profit?
Yes? It's silly to think Big Epipen is out to get you. I don't even know what you think your point is.
We do the best with the information we have. If in 30 years, the standard of care changes due to new consensus, that's a good thing. It doesn't mean everyone is an eeeeeevil moneygrubbing whatever, it just means we have more information.
> ~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.
What's your source here, and how many of those people actually experienced a non-allergic one-off angioedema that was misdiagnosed as anaphylaxis "just in case"? Or worse, wasn't even diagnosed, their parent saw them experience angioedema after eating something for the first time and assumed an allergy without any diagnosis ever?
not a doctor but a "one off face swelling" after eating something for the first time seems like it would be much more rare than an actual allergic reaction.
That's what I thought too, until I had a one off face swelling and throat closing event after eating a new food and went to an allergist, only to learn I was not allergic and have had successful re-eatings of that food.
What I learned from the allergist is, histamine angioedema is essentially the same thing as anaphylaxis, and is treated the same, but is different in cause in that repeat exposure to the food item will not cause a repeat episode.
I'm not a doctor either, but according to my allergist (who is), most people who think they are allergic to some random thing that most people have never heard of people being allergic to, are not in fact allergic to that thing.
Reading the full text of the article you linked it looks like their criteria cover both angioedema and anaphylaxis and add the two together.
I don't know about this one, sounds a bit like anaphylactic shock isn't a big deal because we've made good strides in actually helping people manage and treat it. Which is a good thing, but we can't understate its severity.
Also, our bodies are good at doing things which are technically trying to save us, but actually kill us that doesn't mean we sit idle and do nothing about it, the same is for fevers.
Anaphylactic shock is the body reacting to protect itself against something that isn't actually harmful, but it is doing so to such an extreme that in many cases it kills you.
It's easy to look back at something as a conspiracy when the very impact of it has been mitigated for the average person due to proper healthcare.
If they were having an active anaphylactic reaction, they should have gone to the ER, not trying to buy an Epipen. Even when an Epipen is administered as directed, it is only to buy time to get to the hospital.
> The idea that everything the body does is harmless natural magic that should be allowed to run it's course is killing people.
Not sure where you got this from my point that the risk is overemphasized.
"Although anaphylactic reactions are potentially life threatening, the probability of dying is very low for those cases that require ED or hospital attention, and is likely much lower when all anaphylactic reactions are considered."
I think you misunderstood me. The risk of your immune system going haywire and killing you is a real risk and worthy of medical attention. But I think we are really overstating the prevalence of how many people have an immune system ready to self-destruct them.
Anecdotally a relative recently found out they have a gluten intolerance and while a lot of people would think it's a fad kids latch onto (implied by someone elsewhere in this topic), it actually took a while for it to be identified.
The assumption was they just had anxiety which was causing physical symptoms until they had a blood test that identified the antibody.
Seeing a lot of "illness X is fake" on here and elsewhere lately so i wrongly perceived it here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251020152903/https://www.nytim...
Eating peanuts reduces allergies, but getting peanuts on your skin increases allergies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167491...
Or maybe in your lungs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8429226/#R7
Yes, and this is one reason why eczema is correlated with allergies, because it allows allergens to pass through the skin more readily. And it's probably also a reason why babies put everything in their mouths; they're training their immune systems.
Business idea: Allergen Aerator
Generate a miasma of benign pestilence in your child's crib, mimicking the protective inoculations provided by early exposure to peanuts and other potential allergens, "farm" air, and the like. It could be packaged with Flonase for sneezing parents and an 'essential oils' scent dispenser to cover the barnyard smell.
Use AI to tailor the precise blend of aerosolized rodent feces and tree nut dust to optimize your child's immune system, and et voila: funding!
Bizarre that this is the top comment as this would drastically increase the frequency of peanut allergies and, more than likely, end in multiple deaths. Research strongly suggests that the key is that the child eats peanuts before being exposed via other vectors (skin/lung) to avoid allergic reactions. Arisolizing the relevant proteins around infants is essentially fast tracking allergic reactions.
> Research strongly suggests that the key is that the child eats peanuts before being exposed via other vectors (skin/lung) to avoid allergic reactions.
New business idea: Allergen Feeder
Funnily enough, one of the things we were recommended was a pack of mini nut butter jars. Made specifically for the purpose of being a easy way to expose little ones to a variety of nuts before they could eat the nuts themselves.
Then at each meal put a tiny amount on a spoon and give to the little one before feeding the actual meal, and each meal use the next one butter.
It was great. Sure I can buy peanut butter, or maybe cashew at a grocery store. But I've never seen pecan butter, Brazil nut butter etc.
That’s not a new business idea. It’s been a thing since they announced the new guidelines. You can just buy the stuff https://www.amazon.com/Stage-Mix-ins-Allergen-Introduction-A...
My wife and I were always going to feed our child anything and she’s liked eating food off our plate anyway since she was 6 months old or so, but it was something we considered. So far the only thing we haven’t given her is shellfish.
>You can just buy the stuff
Sadly, you cannot -- all the options in that listing are "currently unavailable."
haha, hilarious. I was going off past purchases. If you search, though, there are many alternatives https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Set-Food-Organic-Puree/dp/B0D9Y...
Old business idea: peanut farming
Okay Jimmy, let’s get you to bed.
I smirked at the parent comment, and it didn't even slightly occur to me that someone might interpret its intent as serious and literal until I saw your comment.
In my experience HNers are extremely credulous.
As far as I can tell, there's no level of satire so heavy-handed and unsubtle that it won't get a reply taking it seriously. If anything, the more obviously ridiculous your suggestion, the more urgently HNers want to disagree.
Partly because reality is getting more stranger faster than satire. There's even an entire subreddit dedicated to that
Yeah, I don't think "surely no one seriously believes this" is viable now, if it was before. Of course, what you choose to do with that conclusion is still up to you.
I'm pretty sure the widespread adoption of Crocs heralded this tipping point. [viz., 'Idiocracy']
I've been on the internet a long time. There are enough weirdos out there to make you understand humor doesn't scale, and it definitely doesn't scale across cultures.
Things are different when you actually know people but we killed that when we killed forums.
The "non-ingestion allergen exposure" thing is a dangerous and common misconception, and the business-idea "joke" doesn't hinge on knowing or recognizing this, nor does it encourage questioning that part of the premise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
I think it’s actually a pretty good comment. Most people would not know that skin and food exposure are different. This is something you are told as a parent though. E.g. My daughter had a skin reaction to (chicken) eggs at week 29 but tolerates them just fine as food and we were not particularly concerned but if no one had told us I would have thought it was a problem.
It is not bizarre, this place is like reddit or the news. Things seem plausible, until once in a while the discussion is something in your area of expertise, then you realise how full of shit everyone is.
At least here we have some exceptions, with some deeply knowledgeable people. But to offset that we have software "engineer" hubris.
You realize it was a joke, right
That person wasn't lying or bullshitting, they were extremely obviously joking.
For food allergies, they already make powders that contains various different allergens that you can expose your kid to starting at a certain age.
And like sibling comment said, you can just also just take them outside and let them be kind of outdoorsy.
This is needs consumer staying power in order to secure the funding. I recommend selling the blends in DRM locked plastic pods and have the device only be operable from a mobile app. The mobile app's purpose would be to gamify the aerosol dispensation by grading it on timeliness, targeted direction and force of the spray, as well as streaks that get posted to social media for a sense of foamo.
Miasma is a very bad idea because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647737
Disappointed this link has nothing to do with Dwarf Fortress.
I heard Toady One will be implementing the allergy mechanics soon (time being relative)
just buy some asian snacks... i've never seen an asian kid allergic to peanuts, when we first heard peanut allergy thought it was a skit
They trade it for 5% infants with egg allergy https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pai.14211
Or Israeli: Israel presents a unique experiment because you have people from different genetic populations from different parts of the world collecting in Israel(eg Sephardic jews from Spain, Ashkenazi from central Europe, Mizrahi from Asia, etc).
Something interesting is that peanut allergies in Israel are far lower than for Jews living in Spain, central europe, etc...
One of the most popular snacks in Israel? Bambas - peanut butter puffs.
Yeah our doctor specifically recommended Bambas. Babies love them and they sell them at Trader Joe's.
Adults love bamba too (speaking as an adult who ate two bags of it just yesterday)
Survivorship bias?
AKA evolution
Not necessarily. How high is child mortality compared to the US?
Just get an overly affectionate dog that gets into the garbage from time to time
Competing with a $2 bag of Planter's? Not so crazy if you corner the market. Now that's SaaSing baby!
>and et voila
et = and, so just _et voilà_.
Or, of course, people could just go outside, with and/or without their babies 8-/
I spent my formative years outside, playing in the dirt. I don't get sick often (or I didn't until covid kicked in).
I choose "and" /s
My son has a peanut allergy. He was deemed very severe. He started treatment daily peanut doses. Starting at 5 mg. He is now eating 4 peanuts a day and counting. Zero issues with exposure now. If you have a kid with a peanut allergy find an allergist who will desensitize them.see https://www.palforzia.com/
Do be careful, though. My nephew (now 4 years old) has/had several food allergies. Some he's ok with now, but for some the desensitizing process resulted in several ER visits.
Common sense thinking wins again. The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it. The #1 way to precipitate this is to keep the body from ever encountering this particle until well beyond its initial phases of immune development.
Are there other modern conditions born from the same "zero-tolerance prevention leads to unintended consequences due to failing to provide the body a robust means to develop"?
I don't know that I agree this is the reasoning, here? Seems far more likely, to me, that there are other environmental factors at play.
I'm almost certainly indexing too heavily on the ideas in birch pollen cross reactivity. But I see basically no reason not to think that same process generalizes quite well into a lot of the things we used to gladly pollute into our environments.
And yes, I know we can still get better at pollution management; but I think people should probably acknowledge just how much progress we have made. Especially in the US. Our air quality is amazingly clean today compared to just 60 years ago. Strikingly so.
Maybe drug policy and the opioid crisis?
> The entire genesis of an allergy is your body treats a benign particle as a pathogen due to not recognizing it
And why the body does not recognize it ? Because it is tainted. Putting all kind of pesticides and other substances on plants does modify the "original".
[Citation needed] for a pesticide connection.
Unless you are an insect, most pesticides are harmless for you. And for those that are not, nobody has proved a connection to allergies.
Have there been any studies on crop-swapping changes such as legumes <--> cotton? Only asking as there were some theories about excess herbicides and pesticides from cotton leeching into the ground and getting absorbed in high amounts by legumes from seasonal crop-swaps.
I'd like to see that, as the current studies seem too convenient. Or at the very least, compare peanut butter from 2005 to peanut butter from 2025.
I attribute to my robust immune system to the amount of dirt I ate as a child, I was a digger in the school yard, and I liked playing in mud - while being a thumb sucker well into elementary school.
Most peanut allergies are noticed during infancy. Advising infants eat more dirt is probably not a good solution to reducing peanut allergies on the whole.
Have you tried it though?
(just kidding)
I've tried giving infants advice before.
For a being with very little gained knowledge they are amazingly skeptical.
Haven't been able to win one over yet.
I know you're being facetious but I wanted to say, a friend of mine's kid recently got diagnosed with elevated lead levels in his blood, likely caused by eating contaminated dirt from their backyard. So... test before you try it, I guess?
My kids love to play in sand, and one time I found my kid playing with "rocks" in the sand before realizing it was a favorite shitting ground for the neighborhood cats
the word is "soil" :-D
The kids I see that have peanut allergies lived in bubbles. It seems like it is self-inflicted but I have no scientific evidence.
My oldest is allergic and spent plenty of time in the sand and dirt. They were exposed to nuts pretty regularly, and fed small amounts from basically as soon as they were taking solid foods.
The hygiene hypothesis is widely accepted, including by allergists, and there's definitely data supporting it, but we don't understand the mechanism, so it's hard to say that it's about any one specific thing vs. many contributing causes that correlate with hygiene and other aspects of the environment around the kid.
The advice about early exposure clearly works though, and there's data to support that early exposure even after confirming the allergy can increase the chances of outgrowing the allergy.
Now we do understand why allergies appear, or at least we have theories that are being tested with studies such as this one. It's all about chance, very literally.
As lymphocytes are formed, they randomly rearrange their T-cell receptor / immunoglobulin genes, creating a random antigen specificity for each cell. [1]
Then, they get selectively killed if they react to self-antigens. [2]
Those that survive, if they ever meet their specific antigen, will selectively multiply [3] and do random mutations again [4].
The current theory is that allergies appear if: (1) some random lymphocyte rearrangement created affinity for that allergen and (2) the allergen was not "known to be safe" by the selection mechanisms of the body and that lymphocyte was allowed to survive.> Then, they get selectively killed if they react to self-antigens. [2]
There's also the ones that react weakly to self antigens and are kept around to put a check on everything else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_T_cell
The thymus is just insane.
Should clarify that the "hygiene hypothesis" has data supporting it for bacteria and allergens but not viruses.
Always a good reminder that absolutism is dangerous. The medical field especially seems subject to this. It took me an insane number of years and multiple doctors and nearly being disabled from it to discover my thyroid condition in large part because "statistically it's mostly women who have thyroid issues" and the monstrously large range of "normal levels of TSH"
> I don't think there are any physics reasons why it'd be impossible
There is extensive evidence that the incidence of severe peanut allergies is significantly increased by the practice of avoiding early exposure in the absence of particular risk indicators, which is why that practice is now advised against.(IIRC, some of the first targeted studies were motivated by observed differences in incidence between the US where early avoidance had become common and Israel where peanut-based puff snacks were a common thing to give to babies not long after starting solid food.)
That reminds me of my parents who most often use peanut oil for cooking. I was eating food cooked in peanut oil every day. I was astounded when I heard in elementary school that people could be allergic to peanuts.
There is no allergenic proteins left in peanut oil or it would burn and be rancid at room temperature. Your anecdata is not relevant here.
There are proteins left in raw pressed peanut oil (used for lower heat cooking and as a finishing oil, somewhat similar to EVOO), but not in highly-refined peanut oil (typically used for high-heat cooking/deep frying.)
Both will eventually go rancid at room temperature , though highly refined oil has a longer shelf life (both sealed and, even moreso, after the seal is broken.)
My brother was/is allergic to peanuts, and it was first noticed in ... 1978 I think, when he was 2. Horrible reaction, nearly died. I'm older, don't have it. A brother younger than both of us also has no allergy to peanuts. We were all raised in the same house, same foods, no bubble environment (the 70s were pretty unbubbled for most kids).
He also had a grape allergy, and reaction was quite severe, but he seemed to outgrow that by his 40s.
Right, allergies are likely a real thing, but I think there's many things nowadays where as soon as we hear of chances of something we go on this hyper vigilant avoidant mode, and that often makes the chances even greater, counterintuitively.
At some points, some things are bad luck, at least until we truly understand the mechanisms and causations.
Fortunately for food allergies, oral immunotherapy seems to be very effective if you can catch the allergy early (before 2 years old). We did for our oldest and the results are miraculous. It's a ton of work though, and I had more than a few near crash-outs from trying to get an 18 month old who doesn't really like the taste of peanut to eat a teaspoon of peanut every single day. That said, I don't regret it.
Even though we keep an epipen around and we make sure they're not eating peanuts, we don't practice strict avoidance anymore, we don't have to worry about the "processed on shared equipment" warnings, and there's no problem if he touches/inhales/eats peanut, meaning we can eat peanuts around him.
There are a ton of studies that indicate that early exposure to peanuts reduces incidence of peanut allergies. I'm not sure about other allergens.
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/search-results?page=...
I haven't searched through the literature, but these days pediatrician advice is to try to do early and regular exposure to all of the common food allergens as soon as they are ready to start solid foods (~6 month mark), if not even a little earlier in their milk/formula.
And yet peanut allergy is rare in Europe. Pretty strange.
I thought peanut allergies were roughly as common in Europe as the US, and a quick web search seems to back this up: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6021584/
I think peanuts are eaten less commonly in Europe? Maybe it just doesn’t come up as much?
Europe is as much a location as the US. Eating habits in Finland are very different than in Spain. So any generalisation here will have people disagreeing. That said, I are lots of peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. It was normal.
My first is allergic to peanuts and I don't think she lived in a bubble but she was born in late 2020 so probably a relative bubble compared to normal times. She was 8mo when she first had a lick of peanut butter, no other allergies and we quickly followed up with tree nut butter to head off anything else.
My kid showed an allergic reaction the third time he had peanuts, at 6-7 months old. We hadn't lived in much of a bubble up to that point.
You say they live in bubbles, but is that before or after discovering the allergy? After the allergy is discovered, some amount of bubble-ing is necessary due to how difficult it is to be certain than something is peanut-free.
Peanut allergies is one of those things I have only seen in American pop culture and media. Like anxious kids breathing in a brown paper bag.
I know people have peanut allergies all over the world. But the significance of the allergy is definitely different in the US than most other places imo.
I've never seen anyone outside of TV breathing into a paper bag
from https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergi...
insert your own pithy remark about "science"...Gotta love how absolutely zero science was done yet you still somehow blame it.
Doctors are not scientists
Diagnosing patients is basically coming up with a hypothesis, doing a test, check if it matches your hypothesis. Repeat if necessary.
What’s missing seems to be a way to aggregate that data and spot patterns.
My son's daycare in Australia doesn't allow peanuts or eggs due to allergy management concerns so I don't think this is an American thing? I had a friend in high school who had a peanut allergy and had an epipen.
"breathing into a brown paper bag"? An anaphylatic reaction is literally a life-threatening event requiring prompt medical intervention. It's not "anxiety".
The brown paper bag [1] was not connected to the peanut allergy, it was mentioned as an example of another thing that only (to OP) seems to happen/be a thing in the US.
[1]: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/breathing-into-a-pap...
Poster is talking about two different phenomenon.
In which case it's even more weird because again: an anaphylactic shock is a life-threatening event that will kill you without prompt medical intervention. The epipen is _literally_ just to keep you alive long enough to get to the hospital.
And funnily enough, the breathing in a paper bag is _absolutely_ a recommended treatment for anxiety attacks by doctors. My father is one, and had my wife do it when she had a panic attack during a particularly rough airplane landing recently.
So again: it's a standard and normal thing, which is in the regular medical parlance.
The reason to do it is your trigger to breathe is based on CO2 acidity, not oxygen - you can't detect O2 (hence why inert gas asphyxiation is a huge hazard) but can detect CO2. But if you start shallow breathing very rapidly you end up in feedback loop. Rebreathing the air ups the CO2 content, which encourages the body to take deeper breathes, which in turn helps with the anxiety and ensures you do get enough oxygen (since you can wind up passing out, and low O2 wipes out the reasoning center of thought very quickly).
> The epipen is _literally_ just to keep you alive long enough to get to the hospital.
Nitpicking here, but I've noticed that all of the words you surround with underscores can be skipped with no information being lost.
Same could be said for your post.
In any given conversation, there is a specific floor level in which you would jump out the window to escape.
This is a 1.5 floor level conversation. It’s not even a conversation, really — you’ve assumed we’re all having a homogenous argument about the validity of the epipen and the brown paper bag, and you’re informing us of our wrongness about something we do not even assert.
But the worst part of it is, you’ve replaced the original poster with me, replying to my comment — which was merely intended to correct a harmless misunderstanding you’ve made — as though I posted the original thought.
What is it you expect me to reply with here? A defense thesis for the original poster? An acceptance that the original poster’s opinion is crushed because of the science you supposedly brought to the table?
I have no doubt that whatever response you have cooking up now will turn this into a 2nd floor one. I’ll be on my way while I can make a soft safe landing, but good luck with whatever it is you hoped to do here.
Perhaps in the format of linear conversation the response was not directed at you but simply continuing the train of thought of the original with respect to the original poster.
But you do you.
Australia has a higher rate of peanut allergy than the US. (3% vs 2%)
One of my conspiracy theories that I loosely hold is that the majority of the fears that we have been sold on allergies was a direct result of marketing efforts by the inventors of the Epipen.
Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare. And even in cases of anaphylactic shock, it's only fatal in an even rarer number of cases (which makes sense, anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself).
We really don't know how many lives emergency epinephrine has saved, but it may have only been necessary in less than 1 out of 50 cases. However, it benefitted the manufacturer to overemphasize the prevalence of dangerous food allergies and the risks of shock and encourage doctors to prescribe them in increasingly more "just in case" cases".
It's in this world that parents and doctors alike became insanely cautious and paranoid about introducing allergens. Conveniently, we saw the rise of simpler, more highly processed baby and childrens' foods at the same time.
I could get onboard with your theory that Epipens are overused (or at least over prescribed). But I really don't agree that when someone can't breath we should "wait and see because it's the body trying to save itself", though.
Children of Gen X and Millenials have been ruined by their helicopter/bubble parents, they have allergies and that's that. Future generations can and must learn from their mistake, but we can't force allergic people to simply grow out of it. We're not talking itchy throats here.
> But I really don't agree that when someone can't breath we should "wait and see because it's the body trying to save itself", though.
I'm absolutely NOT arguing that and I thought my post made it very clear that epinephrine does save lives.
But the overrepresented sense of fear actively made our kids less safe.
Per TFA, it's mainly children of Boomers and Gen X and the trend is now reversing with Millenial children.
Add allergies to the list of things Millenials killed I guess.
It's partly due to certain doctors deciding to tell parents NOT to give peanuts to kids until much later. Even after peanut allergies spiked 3x, they wouldn't change their recommendation - until they had studies to prove the recommendation they were giving was wrong (which they based on no study, "let's try banning peanuts for toddlers...").
see https://www.preventallergies.org/blog/why-are-peanut-allergi...
My inclination is to say it is all hypochondria, that it's a slander against peanut farmers, etc. I know a lot of women, for instance, who don't like insects and are terrified that they might get stung by a bee or a hornet because they don't know if they are allergic to stings because they've never been stung.
On the other hand, I've seen kids have a bad reaction to peanuts and the tiniest dose can be dramatically dangerous.
I think of how allergies to wheat were fashionable before COVID but seem to have been forgotten about in all the confusion. Now there is such as thing as a wheat allergy and I know people who eat the tiniest amount of gluten and their GI tract purges everything in both directions. I know about 10x as many people who have vague symptoms such as "bloating" or nonspecific fatigue who get told by an alternative health practitioner to go gluten free... and instead of eating traditional preparations of other cereals and pseudo-cereals (e.g. a bowl of rice) they seem to think life begins with sandwiches and ends with baked goods and eat nothing but sawdust "bread".
The bloating and non-specific fatigue you mention are symptoms of Celiac disease or gluten insensitivity.
Rather than go to an alternative health practitioner people should just go to an actual doctor and ask them to schedule a blood test. It's an easy thing to test for, so if the doctor won't do it then find another doctor or just go to a lab.
I agree with your point about eating traditional preparations of grains being less problematic and many people seemingly not thinking about that at all for some reason even when they run into problems.
But, I think it may go a step further than that. If we zoom out on the timeline to the span of human evolution, eating grass seeds as a significant part of the diet is very, very, very strange. It wouldn’t surprise me if some human subpopulations, especially those who adopted agriculture later on, aren’t suited to eating grass seeds at all. And I’m just thinking about within European subpopulations. There were people roaming around the steppe when others were long settled. And beyond even that, the population increase enabled by wheat et al could plausibly produce a large enough competitive advantage for the group that some individuals having tummy problems probably would not register much on the selection pressure meter back in those days.
I’ve come around to the idea that wheat sensitivity is probably real. I used to be quite skeptical also. I think if you told someone 30,000 years ago that the earth would be full of people eating mainly grass seeds, they would find the idea completely ridiculous.
Most gluten sensitivities aren't allergies. There is no histamine reaction.
In a lot of cases patients who think they have a gluten intolerance are actually having a bad reaction to one of the many other chemicals that typically come along with gluten. They can test this by consuming pure food-grade gluten with nothing else (not medical advice, check with your doctor).
I'm not a doctor but it feels like there are a lot of holes here.
> Anaphylactic shock is extremely rare
~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.
> it's only fatal in an even rarer number of cases
Could this be due to epipens being commonly carried by people likely to experience anaphylaxis?
> anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself
Because it is an immune response? Is the implication here that anaphylactic shock is actually a good thing?
And focusing on the conspiracy part itself
> the majority of the fears that we have been sold on allergies was a direct result of marketing efforts by the inventors of the Epipen.
Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.
> Could this be due to epipens being commonly carried by people likely to experience anaphylaxis?
The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4382330/
We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't. The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the Epipens do: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10811...
> Implying the increase in EpiPen prescriptions caused people to be more cautious about food allergies feels exactly backwards.
How so? Bringing awareness to risk in general makes people more cautious. Advertising crime rates in your town to sell you a security system will overall make people feel less secure.
> We do know though that hospitalization rates are about the same for people who take epinephrine vs those that don't
An EpiPen is not a cure, and you are told that if you use an EpiPen you should also go to the hospital. An EpiPen essentially keeps you alive long enough to receive care.
> The speed at which they get to the ER seems to have a bigger impact on the recovery from the reaction than the EpiPens do
If you have anaphylaxis without an EpiPen, the first thing the ambulance/ER will do is almost certainly inject epinephrine.
I really encourage you to ask a doctor. It is not enough to read papers and draw conclusions without understanding the broader context. I am not a doctor, but have talked to a doctor about carrying an EpiPen.
> The tricky thing with the data set available to us is that anaphylactic deaths are so rare that it's hard to establish meaningful findings
Again, could this be because there is such abundant access to life saving medication, that you are arguing against?
> Again, could this be because there is such abundant access to life saving medication, that you are arguing against?
I'm not at all arguing that Epipens don't save lives or that doctors shouldn't prescribe them or that you shouldn't carry one.
Let me reframe my argument: Crime is a real risk no matter where you live in this country. But we should not be surprised that people that sell you security are incentivized to scare you about the risk of crime or its randomness.
I would not say people shouldn't take whatever precautions they need against crime, but don't think it's controversial to say the risk is overstated.
It's easy enough to say that never stepping outside of your house because crime exists is a silly conclusion to make. But people for some reason thought it was completely normal to deprive children of exposure to large swaths of the food pyramid despite no underlying history or diagnosis because a risk was overstated to them.
Still, I am admitting that my targeting of Epipens in particular something of a crackpot argument. But also we live in a world still reeling from the effects of the Sackler family and the marketing they used on the medical industry - would it be that far fetched if we learned in 20-30 years that the life saving ability of emergency epinephrine was overstated for profit?
Yes? It's silly to think Big Epipen is out to get you. I don't even know what you think your point is.
We do the best with the information we have. If in 30 years, the standard of care changes due to new consensus, that's a good thing. It doesn't mean everyone is an eeeeeevil moneygrubbing whatever, it just means we have more information.
> ~5% of people in the US have experienced anaphylaxis, but I don't know your definition of rare.
What's your source here, and how many of those people actually experienced a non-allergic one-off angioedema that was misdiagnosed as anaphylaxis "just in case"? Or worse, wasn't even diagnosed, their parent saw them experience angioedema after eating something for the first time and assumed an allergy without any diagnosis ever?
"Anaphylaxis in America: the prevalence and characteristics of anaphylaxis in the United States"
> The most common triggers reported were medications (34%), foods (31%), and insect stings (20%)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24144575/
not a doctor but a "one off face swelling" after eating something for the first time seems like it would be much more rare than an actual allergic reaction.
That's what I thought too, until I had a one off face swelling and throat closing event after eating a new food and went to an allergist, only to learn I was not allergic and have had successful re-eatings of that food.
What I learned from the allergist is, histamine angioedema is essentially the same thing as anaphylaxis, and is treated the same, but is different in cause in that repeat exposure to the food item will not cause a repeat episode.
I'm not a doctor either, but according to my allergist (who is), most people who think they are allergic to some random thing that most people have never heard of people being allergic to, are not in fact allergic to that thing.
Reading the full text of the article you linked it looks like their criteria cover both angioedema and anaphylaxis and add the two together.
Here's some additional info:
https://knyamed.com/blogs/difference-between/angioedema-vs-a...
https://emcrit.org/ibcc/angioedema/#diagnosis_of_angioedema
I don't know about this one, sounds a bit like anaphylactic shock isn't a big deal because we've made good strides in actually helping people manage and treat it. Which is a good thing, but we can't understate its severity.
Also, our bodies are good at doing things which are technically trying to save us, but actually kill us that doesn't mean we sit idle and do nothing about it, the same is for fevers.
Anaphylactic shock is the body reacting to protect itself against something that isn't actually harmful, but it is doing so to such an extreme that in many cases it kills you.
It's easy to look back at something as a conspiracy when the very impact of it has been mitigated for the average person due to proper healthcare.
> it may have only been necessary in less than 1 out of 50 cases.
Ok but who want's to be the one that needs it and can't get it?
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/family-of-teen-who-died-...
>anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself
The idea that everything the body does is harmless natural magic that should be allowed to run it's course is killing people.
If they were having an active anaphylactic reaction, they should have gone to the ER, not trying to buy an Epipen. Even when an Epipen is administered as directed, it is only to buy time to get to the hospital.
> The idea that everything the body does is harmless natural magic that should be allowed to run it's course is killing people.
Not sure where you got this from my point that the risk is overemphasized.
>Not sure where you got this from
Your original post.
>which makes sense, anaphylactic shocks is a biological reaction of your body to save itself, not kill itself).
i think you misunderstood something here, anaphylactic shock is by definition a medical emergency.
Anaphylaxis is only fatal in ~0.3% of cases that required hospitalization.
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(13)02738-3/ful...
"Although anaphylactic reactions are potentially life threatening, the probability of dying is very low for those cases that require ED or hospital attention, and is likely much lower when all anaphylactic reactions are considered."
I think you misunderstood me. The risk of your immune system going haywire and killing you is a real risk and worthy of medical attention. But I think we are really overstating the prevalence of how many people have an immune system ready to self-destruct them.
yes i think i did misunderstand a little.
Anecdotally a relative recently found out they have a gluten intolerance and while a lot of people would think it's a fad kids latch onto (implied by someone elsewhere in this topic), it actually took a while for it to be identified.
The assumption was they just had anxiety which was causing physical symptoms until they had a blood test that identified the antibody.
Seeing a lot of "illness X is fake" on here and elsewhere lately so i wrongly perceived it here.