It's trivial to find a single factor that plays a role in thousands of diseases - pretty much anything you consume or anything you do is going to have effects across your entire body.
Every 10 years the medical research community goes through another publishing fad: In the 90s everything was about carbs, then 2000s everything was about oxidative stress, then in the 2010s it was all the gut microbiome, now its alllll chronic inflammation. The scientific publishing fad trickles into science journalism, then mainstream media, then to influencers and snake oil salesman. There is overselling and sensationalization at each step in the pipeline. Forget last decade's news, this time *this* factor is the ONE. The one key to unlock a revolution in medicine.
I'm not saying chronic inflammation isn't important, but you should be immediately skeptical of anyone who claims that something as extraordinarily complex as the human body with its thousands of interacting systems can be reduced to a single metric, a single tunable master knob that where the only problem left is figuring out how to turn that knob. Complex interacting systems rarely work that way.
That's my soap box speech about chronic inflammation. But beyond that, this article is a puff piece that only gives a very superficial discussion of chronic inflammation, basically just defining what chronic inflammation is (poorly) and linking to a potpourri of articles adjacent to chronic inflammation with less than one sentence summaries of what they say, finally meandering into a discussion about the philosophy of medical discovery without every really forming a coherent point
Hmmm...I found this underwhelming. Yes it would be wonderful if there was a revolution of understanding in relation to chronic inflammation. However this article doesn't talk about any leads on what those new theories might be.
the thing I learned from my 6 years of covid is this: the medical community looks for chemical markers, but inflammation can physically freeze a joint, cut off circulation, and compress nerves. And there's no real way they have of talking about it or dealing with it.
Calavar | 2 months ago
It's trivial to find a single factor that plays a role in thousands of diseases - pretty much anything you consume or anything you do is going to have effects across your entire body.
Every 10 years the medical research community goes through another publishing fad: In the 90s everything was about carbs, then 2000s everything was about oxidative stress, then in the 2010s it was all the gut microbiome, now its alllll chronic inflammation. The scientific publishing fad trickles into science journalism, then mainstream media, then to influencers and snake oil salesman. There is overselling and sensationalization at each step in the pipeline. Forget last decade's news, this time *this* factor is the ONE. The one key to unlock a revolution in medicine.
I'm not saying chronic inflammation isn't important, but you should be immediately skeptical of anyone who claims that something as extraordinarily complex as the human body with its thousands of interacting systems can be reduced to a single metric, a single tunable master knob that where the only problem left is figuring out how to turn that knob. Complex interacting systems rarely work that way.
That's my soap box speech about chronic inflammation. But beyond that, this article is a puff piece that only gives a very superficial discussion of chronic inflammation, basically just defining what chronic inflammation is (poorly) and linking to a potpourri of articles adjacent to chronic inflammation with less than one sentence summaries of what they say, finally meandering into a discussion about the philosophy of medical discovery without every really forming a coherent point
LD50_irony | 2 months ago
Thank you for this overview so I didn't waste time reading it, sincerely
Major-Tumbleweed7751 | 2 months ago
Hmmm...I found this underwhelming. Yes it would be wonderful if there was a revolution of understanding in relation to chronic inflammation. However this article doesn't talk about any leads on what those new theories might be.
latswipe | 2 months ago
the thing I learned from my 6 years of covid is this: the medical community looks for chemical markers, but inflammation can physically freeze a joint, cut off circulation, and compress nerves. And there's no real way they have of talking about it or dealing with it.
ronaldvr | 2 months ago
People who themselves begin over Kuhn and paradigm shift usually are wrong (and actually have not or misread Kuhn)
esotericcomputing | 2 months ago
Can an article with a Betteridge headline actually deliver on its promise?
eversincenewyork | 2 months ago
Surprised that there is not a single mention of autoimmune disease in this article.