this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
1154 points (98.0% liked)

Lemmy Shitpost

26237 readers
2799 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.

Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!


Rules:

1. Be Respectful


Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.

Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.

...


2. No Illegal Content


Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.

That means:

-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals

-No CSA content or Revenge Porn

-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)

...


3. No Spam


Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.

-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.

-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.

-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers

-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.

...


4. No Porn/ExplicitContent


-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.

-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.

...


5. No Enciting Harassment,Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts


-Do not Brigade other Communities

-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.

-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.

-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.

...


6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.


-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.

...

If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.


Also check out:

Partnered Communities:

1.Memes

2.Lemmy Review

3.Mildly Infuriating

4.Lemmy Be Wholesome

5.No Stupid Questions

6.You Should Know

7.Comedy Heaven

8.Credible Defense

9.Ten Forward

10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)


Reach out to

All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Devil's advocate:

Crystals - placebo effect can be a thing, and if they provide a sense of relief that's a good thing. As long as they still take their actual medicne and don't think putting a herring in a sock will cure cancer.

Cables - While there's obviously a cut-off point. As an IT guy I have fixed a not-insignificant number of issues with sound/display/network quality/dropouts by replacing crap/damaged cables with slightly more expensive ones. Just don't expect them to turn. a 360p stream into 4k

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adherence sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that's fine I guess.

But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.

Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the "innocent" use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah it's definitely not the best. In both examples you end up with people being ripped off (there's also "magic" audio cables out there that cost more than my first car).

I just wanted to play the devil's advocate for a bit of fun. Would be much better in both situations of they had to label it as "not going to do much more than give you a small dopamine hit".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Spot on. the placebo effect is powerful and very likely plays a role in both scenarios.

Often I have supposed really expensive cables improve things just because it was time to replace cables already, or the connection was janky to begin with because the budding audiophile is upgrading from bare wire connectors to banana plugs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That isn't really a placebo effect though. It's just imagining things but for it to be a placebo effect your imagination would also have to lead to an actual, measurable improvement of the audio quality. Which needless to say is impossible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would agree except:

It creates an environment for scammers and charlatans to thrive. They grow and become more powerful and exploit more people. And the behavior becomes more common and more accepted as "that's just how it is" or "their own fault, lol idiots..."

It's just not worth it. A patient can tell themselves a white lie if they want, but it should be illegal for ANYONE, doctor or not to sell unproven medicine, and we need to crack down on the "not intended to treat or cure any illness" loophole.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Absolutely great point which I had not considered.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

More than placebo, I think it’s a god source for spiritualism.

I’m one of those “edgelords” that believe that organised religion doesn’t have a place in a civilised modern society, but I don’t think spiritualism in and of itself is bad.

Thus I’m all for crystals, horoscopes, praying and whatnot to fulfill one’s spiritual needs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I’m pagan but I have issues with most modern use of crystals in spiritualism. Not on religious grounds (except the geotheistic ones), but because they’re almost never harvested ethically or in a way that isn’t extremely bad for the environment.

If you find some nice crystals in a walk through the forest or if you inherit some use them by all means, but more people need to consider the consequences of the materials they use in their spiritual practice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm personally moreso of a believer that humans don't necessarily need spiritualism, we just need purpose. That purpose can be found following a deity or other spiritual pursuits, but can also be found with a task or organization, for example, volunteer work is often a source of community and meaningful interaction. It's when life feels purposeless that people fall into isolation and depression.