When Numbers Get Serious

A week ago, The Boy and I took one of our not infrequent road trips to visit the dietitian. I've been a little suspect of his devotion to the whole regime of vegetables, and I thought he'd been a bit lax with some of his supplements (vitamins and minerals).

But the numbers came back great. Mine came back pretty good, too, which sort of surprised me, since they'd been so bad before. I'm allowed to exercise a little and eat a little meat. (This diet discourages heavy meat eating. Three times a week, maximum.)

I spent a year and a half as a mostly-vegetarian. That is, I didn't eat any meat during the week, but since I went home for weekends and mom considers vegetarianism a personal affront, I did eat fish then. It was actually very difficult for me to start eating meat again. I mean, just contemplating it was sort of appalling.

Weird, eh? Well, I just spent six weeks as an actual vegetarian and I assure you my celebratory hot turkey sandwich was quite welcome. (I'm not even a turkey fan but--well, I'm not going to food blog just yet, but the sandwich will be back.)

I could observe that I continue to benefit from this program, and The Boy continues to reduce his insulin, but I see the government has already established that alternative forms of treatment are pretty much universally bunk.

Well, not really: They've apparently spent $2.5B paying other people to test them, in God knows what fashion. I've linked to this guy, Phil Plait, instead of to the direct article because he captures so well the attitude I've seen of some: It's vitally important to them that nobody ever believe anything that can't be proven in a double-blind study.

Frankly, I don't think most of these things work, but since placebos (called "dummy pills" now, apparently) have something like a 20% success rate, I tend to think the placebo is under-prescribed. I mean, I doubt those "male enhancement" pills have any effect whatsoever, but if a guy believes that they do and benefits from that belief, how cruel to take that away from him!

Most of the programs I've seen that seemed very effective were not really pharmaceutical replacements, they were regimens. Lifestyle changes. You could argue (successfully, I think) that the gains were from a variety of banal things, rather than, say, distilled water or walnut tincture.

And I wouldn't really care if you did, so long as I'm free to do whatever crazy thing I want.

My concern, of course, is that the government will get both wrong: Prescribing things that don't work while proscribing things that do. In fact, I can guarantee you that already happens, routinely.