|
The gold standard of research is not academic peer-reviewed studies, which we will get to below, but learning from the experiences of people suffering the same illness, condition or injury that you are suffering. You can learn about other people's specific symptoms and situations and read their detailed descriptions of what has and has not worked for them. However, you will need to read the experiences of dozens if not hundreds of people. Only then will you see trends and differences among different people. Moreover, in the process, you will read recommendations on protocols and specialists. You will then get ideas about what might work for you. Start by reading comments made in online groups (such as those on Facebook) and by scouring the comment sections of podcasts (such as those on YouTube) discussing your illness. Get as many viewpoints as you can. Also highly useful are podcasts freely provided by doctors who specialise in areas of health. Here, you can learn what these specialists have observed in treating hundreds of patients suffering similar illnesses. If you are lost as to where to start, check out the following YouTube channels. We are not saying that the presenters are right or wrong or that we agree or disagree with them. Rather, these channels provide a range of views that might get you thinking about health from different angles. 1. Dr Peter Osborne (https://www.youtube.com/@DrOsborne) 2. Elliot Overton (https://www.youtube.com/@EONutrition) 3. Dr Paul Saladino (https://www.youtube.com/@Paulsaladinomd) 4. Dr Ken Berry (https://www.youtube.com/@KenDBerryMD) 5. Candi Frazier (https://www.youtube.com/@CandiFrazier) 6. Mark Sisson (https://www.youtube.com/@marksdailyapple) If you want to learn the science of the body, a remarkable educator is: 7. Khan Academy (scroll to the biology section at https://www.youtube.com/@khanacademy) And if you want to understand the science of soil and the nutrients therein, a brilliant educator is Dr Elaine Ingham: 8. Dr. Elaine's Soil Food Web School (https://www.youtube.com/@soilfoodwebschool) So what about peer-reviewed studies (papers)? Each year, more than a million papers on health and medicine are published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Yet they have barely advanced health and medicine. In saying that, papers do have their place. Indeed, this author has hundreds of papers stored on his computer at any one time for reference. However, papers are limited in what they tell us. For example, a paper might be limited to studying the effect of one treatment, in one form, at one dose, for one short period, for one group, without considering co-factors or the specific requirements of the patients, and then conclude that the treatment does not work. As such, papers are best used to test our understanding of a health topic. Once we feel we have some understanding of a topic, we read papers to see whether we can explain the presented results. Furthermore, papers do not suggest treatments. The treatments that papers investigate have already been tried and shown promise. The papers are written after the treatments have been suggested. If you are waiting on academia to confirm the effectiveness of a treatment, you will be wasting years of potentially good health. The publishing of papers is part of academia, where a researcher's career simply involves publishing papers, not part of advancing human health. However, if you want to begin reading papers to get ideas on health, use Google Scholar or PubMed to search for papers and use GPTChat to look up the (many) terms and concepts that you will not understand. GPTChat better explains concepts to those who are learning and allows follow-up questions, whereas Wikipedia typically requires you to be an expert in a particular field already and is often censored and politicized in terms of what it states is scientifically valid. In particular, search for meta or review studies, which summarize past research on a particular health topic, as they often analyze how different variations of a treatment have worked across different groups of people. Finally, start by reading the abstract and conclusion of a paper, rather than losing yourself in the methodology and results sections of the paper. In many cases, you will only have access to the abstract of the paper unless you pay for full access. In doing your own research, keep in mind that health science has been compartmentalised, with experts in one field rarely talking to experts in another field. This approach is not well suited to understanding the complexities of human health. As such, much of your progress will involve piecing together information. Also keep in mind that your average doctor will not be interested in the papers that you read and what you discover. Few doctors are scientists or scientifically minded. Finally, we best keep in mind how much science, particularly health science and medicine, is censored. Health science is censored by government, the media, the journals in which scientific papers are published, and online resources such as Wikipedia. Doctors who have raise concerns about treatments or drugs have been fired, censured and struck off. This is no secret; the boards and organisations who have ended the doctors' careers have proudly declared that they have done so. Scientists studying topics that are inconvenient to the medical establishment and university funding donors have had their funding pulled and their teams shut down by their universities. Whistleblowers have been silenced. Drugs that could have saved millions of lives have been demonised, even by their own manufacturers, because there are other drugs that can make the industry more money. Nutrients in which the global population is severely deficient, and whose supplementation could halve world disease tomorrow, are demonised as dangerous to take in the most unscientific manner. Indeed, in our own research, we often discover the most promising solutions and advances in medical science by searching for what is currently being censored. Distrust anyone who claims that they believe in science. Science is to be challenged, not believed in. |
|