One thing that comes up in support groups, or mental health health groups on social media, is that there will be people advocating holistic approaches, or going completely off your meds.

You need to make an assessment of how bad your condition was before you were medicated. If you're bipoar II and don't experience major psychosis, it may be tempting to go back to your previous state, but do take an honest look at how things had been going -- were you losing jobs, were a lot of friendships turning out badly? One symptom of bipolar mania, even if its not severe, is that you're rubbing everyone around you the wrong way and have no idea you're doing it.

I've been in a bipolar support group where the husband of a bipolar person was absolutely dying for her to take her meds, and the bipolar wife (who wasn't present) wanted to be off meds. The husband was so desperate that he was considering cooking lithium into her food, so she'd be medicated without realizing it.

Medical science is hard. Sometimes people get better for no reason, sometimes people die for no reason. What works on one person might not work on another. To help sick people get better, you need a lot of training.

A lot of the time, there is a placebo effect. A certain fraction of patients given a pill that has no drugs in it will get better. Generally, if you take 100 people with the same sickness, give 50 of them, chosen at random, a pill with no drugs in it, and give the other 50 nothing, the group that got the pill will do quite a bit better. This is a very well-known phenomenon.

So if someone has invented a new treatment, to find out if it's any good, it's necessary to do a trial on a large number of patients, where half the patients are given the med, and half are given a sugar pill. Furthermore, it has to be double-blind, that is, the doctors giving out the pills must not know which is which, to avoid tipping off the patients with their subconscious manner or facial expressions.

All this is very expensive and time-consuming. One reason that drugs get so expensive is that just doing the trials to determine that the drug works costs many millions of dollars and takes years, so when the drug is finally ready to be sold, the drug maker has only a few years left before the patent expires to charge a high enough price to make back all the money they spent on the trials.

If a treatment is herbal or "natural", it can be sold without doing these expensive trials, that is, it can be sold without anybody having any idea whether it works. Welcome to "alternative medicine".

There are two types of "alternative medicine":

• cures which have not been shown to work
• cures which have been shown not to work

If someone does a trial and a cure that was previously considered "alternative medicine" is shown to work, then regular doctors start dispensing it and it is no longer "alternative", it is just "medicine".

If a treatment is shown not to work, people can still write testimonials on the Internet about how it miraculously "cured" them, because hey, freedom of speech.

Generally, alternative medicine is a complete waste of time and money, and if used instead of real medicine, downright dangerous.

In 2004, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, got pancreatic cancer. While pancreatic cancer is normally life-threatening, the kind he had, which is called islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, is much less serious and is normally treatable.

For 9 months he refused to do what doctors were telling him to, choosing alternative medicine, diet, and even seeing a psychic instead.

Eventually he did have surgery, but it did not save him.

On Wikipedia, several doctors express varying opinions about whether this silliness caused Jobs his life. Harvard cancer researcher Dr. David Gorski says it's hard to know, but Dr. Barrie Cassileth of Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life .. He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable ... He essentially committed suicide.".

My brother's doctor told him he had a strange heart condition. He went to more specialists and eventually what they found out was that his heart was completely healthy, it was just that he was so exceptionally healthy, running marathons at 60, that his heart appeared "abnormal" to a normal doctor.

After that, he started going to a doctor who dealt with super-fit patients. The doctor had two spcialties:

• super-fit patients, and
• AIDS patients (my brother did not have AIDS)

He told my brother that he gives each new AIDS patient a speech on their first visit: "AIDS is no longer a death sentence. If you do what I tell you, and take your medication, you will live a normal lifespan."

But the medication has side effects, and the Internet is chock-full of medical disinformation and conspiracy theories about how wrong the medical establishment is, and how evil Big Pharma is, that 1/8th of the patients don't stick with the program, but go holistic, and they all die. And nothing bad ever happens to the people giving these patients all this bad advice, they're never held accountable for their baloney.

One problem with social media is that it attacks people. Somebody tells a joke that a lot of people take the wrong way, and overnight, millions of people on social media are sending e-mails to the HR department of the author's workplace saying that they're a terrible person who deserves to be fired. A lot of people live in fear of these "cancellations".

But not just individuals get cancelled, sometimes whole institutions do. In 2020, the political right on social media tried to destroy the profession of medicine. The same year, the political left on social media tried to destroy the profession of law enforcement.

People decided vaccines were dangerous, which I've heard intelligent people argue about both ways, but a lot of people took it so far that not only did they refuse to be vaccinated, they refused to even wear masks on an airplane when they were going to be surrounded by total strangers 3 feet away from them in all directions for 5 hours while indoors. They took it so far they were against any measure to slow the spread of the virus, however obviously reasonable.

I just saw Anthony Fauci (now retired) interviewed on TV, on December 9th, 2022. He spent some time reassuring younger doctors that they should stick with medicine, it's a rewarding profession. Is these what we've come to? Doctors are getting so much stupid shit on social media from ignorant morons that they're thinking of quitting and they need to be reassured?

Before social media, not everybody had much of a voice. The average person could maybe write a letter to the editor of a newspaper, but they would only publish a few letters of their choosing. For the most part, to get reporters to ask your opinions about something, the reporter had to see evidence that you knew what you were talking about. With social media, everyone has a voice, and there's been an erosion of respect for institutions, of respect for expertise, and complete idiots are often running the show.