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A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load. It’s good to get in the habit of asking what benefits you should see when, and pinning your doctor down on when they will give a medication up as useless.

It’s worth noting here that human memory can be pretty bad. If you care about an issue enough to try multiple different solutions it’s likely also worthwhile to have regular measurements for the issue, so that you are not relying on your memory.

If you have an issue like pain in a body area, marking the location of the pain and then photographing it, is one way to have a good record.

One failure case is that there are a few treatments like colon cleansing, whose popularity partly relies on them producing surprising results for the person, that are medically useless. It’s important to be able to say “This treatment does something surprising but it doesn’t really solve the issue I’m having, so I shouldn’t take the fact that it does something surprising as evidence that it’s somehow working.”

“an easy lever might be a guide to obvious failure modes of supplements and medications”

I desire to see more things like this.. Especially if they’re presented not as a list of “gotchas”, but as specifics of a general moving-parts model of how naive models/​strategies operate in a complex space. Should be lots of base rates being thrown around.

A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting, and phasing treatments out if they don’t justify the mental load

This part has been a historical blocker to me using luck/​exploration based medicine. If one is dissociated, alexythmic, or has an experience completely dominated by one sensation like pain or anxiety, then it’s going to be pretty hard to notice fine gradations in how well they’re doing. Not having precision really narrows the possible paths to success; effect has to be almost overdetermined before one actually updates on the evidence.

An extension of the noticeable risks and helping/​hurting points I think is worth separating out: how to identify and avoid literal poisons. Not risky bets, per se, but things that are likely to directly harm the objective (health) and the other conditions necessary to make your strategy viable (kill your liver, mind, ability to move under your own power).I think it’s a useful comparison point to know what it takes to figure out what is safe to eat in an unfamiliar environment. There’s a protocol for slow steps of Graduated exposure and Waiting to see how well it’s tolerated. Accumulated culture and the FDA are so very cheating technique. It’s worth understanding how much work it otherwise takes to narrow down what world you are in without leaning on them.

A system for recognizing when things are helping and hurting

Do you have a particular way you recommend to measure and track mental effects? I have not been able to find something that is sufficiently sticky and sufficiently informative and sufficiently easy.

A functioning liver.

What tests do you do or have done or consider to check for a functioning liver?