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.”
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.”