[AnthonBerg]

Seconded.

I... I don't know how to get it across; For the love of God read the literature on NAC, alpha lipoic acid, bromhexine, and ambroxol.

Just... read. Read the molecular biology papers.

[p1esk]

Would regular engineers like us understand molecular biology papers?

[AnthonBerg]

I'm just some rando and I do!

It sounds like a hero story – it's not, it's more an existential nightmare and funny story? – but I kind of accidentally came to start reading all kinds of papers. Then fiancée was diagnosed with a severe condition. And just by having read stuff I found myself needing to interject doctors during her treatment, quite pointedly, to avoid risk of harm to her and unborn child – with my view being confirmed every single time by another doctor's second opinion.

It's mostly about reading fast enough, not actually requiring a feeling of comprehension. Skimming and going fast through lots of stuff. With extreme humility!! And then bit by bit an intuition kind of grows and you cut through the jargon and get a feeling for the core things. The mights and maybes and relationships in things. And then sort of learning to trust and not trust that intuition and have it guide your reading. It mostly shows up as doubt – an active doubt? – rather than an opaque sense of not having any feeling for things. Then that sometimes refines away from doubt into a sense of clarity towards some mechanism that's probably at play. Keeping absolutely humble towards it is suuuuuuper important, and it's always necessary to retain the perspective of oneself as limited and fallible.

It's also very hard to get this stuff into words. Seems more nebulous and "cosmic" than it is. It's just how our minds and reading comprehension work. It's about feeding the pattern detection systems with... substrate? A handle on things?

There are a few reasons why it works. "Works" as in is beneficial and useful to read, beyond just trusting doctors. (Do trust doctors!, –Jusr... help them help you. That's the thing.) One reason is that doctors do not have time to read, even if they'd very much want to. This is sort of force-multiplied?... with the personalization aspect: It is immensely valuable to read molecular biology from the personal perspective of operating and being inside a specific instance of that molecular biology machinery. The doctor's view is always more general (and is always a guardrail of safety, in part because of that). Then another reason is that there is SO MUCH actionable science out there. Just eminently safe and very, very actionable. It's so hard to get it across how it might be so, how it could possibly be, but it is. It really is.

[DANmode]

You’ll understand the abstract and the conclusion!

:eyeroll:

[vixen99]

Or browse these; https://www.freefullpdf.com/search_gcse/?q=NAC#gsc.tab=0&gsc...

[FrustratedMonky]

"just read the paper" is a bogus argument.

There are thousands of subjects with thousands of papers. To read them all would take thousands of years.

The reason we use summaries is because there is no time to be an expert at everything.

[AnthonBerg]

This isn't an argument. This is a description of an angle on staying alive, better, for longer. It's a competitive advantage in a Darwinian situation.

Don't read thousands of papers. Read some papers. Not too carefully. Mostly published ones.

Why talk to people? There are billions of them? It would take many years? C'mon.

[TripleTree]

Where would you recommend?