I am Issa Rice. https://issarice.com/
riceissa
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[Question] How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research?
Other commenters have already hinted at this, but I suspect that terms like “saturated fat”, “seed oils”, and “omega-6 PUFA” are not specific enough, and I further suspect that this makes basically all studies mostly useless (because they work with these flawed coarse terms). “Saturated fat” can be tallow from factory-farmed cows or cultured butter from grass-fed grass-finished cows (and even that isn’t specific enough; was the grass sprayed with XYZ pesticide? etc.). “Omega-6 PUFA” can be highly heated seed oils chemically treated to deodorize them (masking their rancidity), or some of the oils in e.g. whole nuts. Even something specific-sounding like “extra virgin olive oil” can unfortunately mean pretty much anything because there’s a bunch of fraud going on, so the actual bottle in front of you probably isn’t the real thing.
My bottom line is pretty similar to yours though. Clearly something went wrong in the last few hundred years, and probably diet is a good chunk of it. So treat any kind of modern processing or ingredient with suspicion and as much as possible try to eat as humans ate before the last few hundred years.
Hi, I wanted to give an update. Capnometry biofeedback worked better than I expected. My baseline ET CO2 went from around 27mmHg to around 40mmHg in the first 1.5 weeks of using the device, and stayed there for the whole month I had access to the device. (I’ve now returned the device.) The key thing I discovered was that even though I was already nasal breathing 99.9% of the time, my nasal breaths were still quite audible and so I was overbreathing because of that. The biofeedback+coaching allowed me to switch my breathing to a silent nasal one in stages. I still experience air hunger, but it is a lot more subtle than before. I still have trouble talking, some of the time (I think talking makes me overbreathe, so if I start out with no air hunger then I can talk for quite a while, but if I start talking when I already have some air hunger, then I quickly reach my limits). I still on occasion mysteriously have a lot more air hunger than normal and feel like I “forgot how to breathe”, and I wonder if that means I have some sort of autonomic problem… I’ve been writing up a lot of my thoughts here. I might retry capnometers in a few months or a year or something, but for now my plan is to go back to (original Russian-lineage) Buteyko method and really logging the time (rather than half-assing it, which is what I was doing previously with Buteyko). Feel free to ask any questions.
Interesting, I don’t know anything about the quality of different SLIT manufacturers, but $2600 sounds a lot more affordable than $7000. I’ll try to remember to ask my allergist about this if I ever see them again.
My understanding (based on watching some YouTube lectures and talking to my allergists) is that SCIT (aka allergy shots) and SLIT are equally effective but (at least in the US) SLIT is not covered by insurance so SCIT ends up being a lot cheaper for most people. The main problem with SCIT is that it requires going to the allergy clinic every week for a while, then every month for a while over a period of about 3 years (but it is possible to speed things up quite a bit by doing cluster shots or double shots). I tried doing SCIT last year but my chronic illness made it too difficult to go to the clinic each week so I eventually had to stop (I imagine this won’t be a problem for most other people). My allergy clinic gave me an estimate that SLIT would cost roughly $7000 total over 3 years, whereas SCIT for me was free with my insurance.
How were you getting SLIT for $25/week, how much did SLIT cost in total for you, and were the doses tailored to your particular allergies based on tests?
I had a couple more questions about the CONTEC device:
What’s the lag time from when you breathe to when the waveform is displayed on the screen, and when the number updates?
How does it prevent water (from exhaled air) from getting into the device? The CapnoTrainer uses water traps inserted between the cannula and the device itself, and these water traps need to be replaced every once in a while. But I haven’t seen anything similar for the CONTEC device.
I haven’t verified the correctness of what this person is saying, but this Reddit comment seems relevant:
Most yoga breathing techniques have been completely misinterpreted from the ancient texts, and incorrectly teach people to breath larger amounts of air, when true deep breathing (deep as in from the diaphragm) is very still and almost imperceptible at rest. Buteyko teaches how to reset the part of the brain that controls autonomic breathing back to this very gentle still breath. Lau Tzu said ‘the perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing’ . The things that throw out the breathing pattern/volume (and in turn the whole body’s biochemistry) are stress and diet, and environmental toxins mostly, but once this happens its hard to reset the breath back to normal without a correct breath practice. And most yogic breathing as taught in the west is the sadly exact opposite of what is needed.
One data point: https://youtu.be/XliOGg8Tl98?t=230
Thank you, this is helpful!
I found someone in my local area who has a CapnoTrainer and was willing to rent it out to me and coach me, so it was a lot cheaper than the official route. But yeah, in general rentals are quite expensive unfortunately. If I couldn’t find anyone who would rent one out to me for a reasonable price, I would probably have just gone with the CONTEC device as you did.
When I originally wrote this LW post, I had never used a capnometer of any kind (it just seemed quite promising and I was confused why basically no one was talking about it). After writing the post, I found someone who would rent a CapnoTrainer to me, and have been using the device now for about a week. The CapnoTrainer is still the only capnometer I have used. It’s still too early for me to say whether the device “worked” or not, but so far it’s been a quite promising experience (I’m planning to write more in maybe a month when the rental period ends).
The contec does show the waveform, it’s just on a tiny screen so not the most detailed.
Huh, okay, that is good to know. I was looking at images like this one where the wave form is clearly the SpO2, rather than CO2:
But scrolling through more of the images, I do see this, which looks like a CO2 curve:
I am guessing there must be some way to switch which graph you see?
Talking is really bad too for me. If I talk for a sentence or less, let myself breathe a few breaths while not moving, then resume talking and keep pausing for a while after talking only a bit that helps a lot.
This sounds so much like me… (Luckily I don’t seem to have the problem with movement, but eating (specifically swallowing) makes me nervous too.) I don’t know if you’ve looked into Peter Litchfield’s work (he has a bunch of videos on YouTube too), but he talks a lot about altering your subconscious/unconscious breathing habits instead of consciously using techniques as crutches to save you from an episode. I recently got access to a CapnoTrainer so that will be my plan for hopefully fixing my breathing (I already did this once when going from ~80% nose-breathing to ~99.9% nose-breathing—it took about a month of anxiously paying too much attention to my breath, but after a month or so it became totally natural).
I self-studied a bunch of math in 2017-2019 in order to do AI alignment research (specifically, agent foundations type stuff), and have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. Feel free to message me if you want to discuss.
Thank you, this is really fascinating! After writing this post, I talked to someone who does biofeedback using a capnometer, and they also mentioned that same CONTEC device as a cheap but still accurate capnometer. Their main gripe with it was that it responds more slowly compared to the CapnoTrainer and doesn’t show the wave form, so it is not as good for doing biofeedback with (e.g. apparently the CapnoTrainer can show things like aborted breaths or weird exhalation patterns, whereas the CONTEC device can’t show that), but it is still good enough for detecting CO2 levels.
I would love to read more about your experiences with your breathing issue and what you’ve tried. Your description of your problem seems similar to my own—for example, I notice that talking out loud seems to dysregulate my breathing pretty quickly.
Does this mean that a cheap “pseudo-capnometer” can be created which measures VOCs collected via a nasal cannula? Or would measuring VOCs instead of CO2 change the results at that level (but why?)?
Thank you!
Does “COTS” stand for “commercial off-the-shelf” or is this some more technical acronym related to CO2 measurements?
Ultimately the reason it’s not popular is probably because it doesn’t seem that useful. Breathing is automatic and regulated by blood CO2 concentration; I find it hard to believe that the majority of the population, with otherwise normal respiratory function, would be so off the mark. Is there strong evidence to suggest this is the case?
I agree that this wouldn’t be useful for the majority of the population. (Some breathing gurus claim that poor breathing is responsible for pretty much every health problem ever including anxiety, depression, sleep problems, heart problems, brain fog, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, chronic pain, etc. I don’t buy these strong claims.) As I tried to make clear in the original question, my own interest in this is personal: I’ve been having chronic shortness of breath for over a decade and the doctors just shrug and say “maybe it’s anxiety” and give me inhalers which don’t work. But I suspect others like me are not all that rare. This video (that explains air hunger in terms of carbon dioxide levels and overbreathing) has 53k views and 2.2k likes; Reddit is full of people complaining about air hunger; something like 8% of all EMS responses in the US are from a combination of “respiratory distress” and “shortness of breath” (most of which I assume are not life-threatening; see this Quora question for some evidence, and my one and only time so far on an ambulance to the ER was due to feeling like I couldn’t breathe which in retrospect was probably due to overbreathing). So again, I don’t think the majority of the population would need to do anything about their breathing, but that seems like quite a high bar that basically no health problem could clear. I’m instead suggesting that it’s quite a common problem (but I don’t know exactly how common), and asking why this device which seems like it would be helpful for this common problem is virtually unknown.
I was not familiar with that term, but I am aware of sleep apnea and how that can lead to too-high levels of carbon dioxide. Like I said in a different comment, my current understanding is that both too-high and too-low are problems. In my case (and in other cases where people have anxiety-like shortness of breath) I think what’s going on is too-low carbon dioxide. But having a capnometer seems useful for correcting both too-low and too-high carbon dioxide.
My understanding is that like many things, both low and high are bad (high carbon dioxide is called hypercapnia), so you want to be in the “good” range (I typically see 35-45 mmHg of partial pressure carbon dioxide being cited as the good range). In rationalist circles I have seen discussion of too-high atmospheric carbon dioxide being bad, but I am myself confused on how that connects to carbon dioxide levels in the blood (and separately, I’m not convinced that higher carbon dioxide levels in the air are bad either).
[Question] Why is capnometry biofeedback not more widely known?
Was the update ever posted? I am interested in getting a capnometer for an unrelated reason and was curious where people decided to get theirs.
I feel like doing correctness right requires originality after a certain point, so the two don’t feel too distinct to me. Early in one’s intellectual development it might make sense to just “shop around” for different worldviews by reading widely, but after a while you are going to be routinely bumping into things that aren’t on the collective map.
The casus belli example Habryka gives in the “Correctness as defence against the dark arts” strikes me as an example of … how originality helps defend against the dark arts! (I am guessing here that Habryka did not just read some old rationalist blog post called “Casus belli, how people use it to manipulate each other, and how to avoid getting got”, but that he formed this connection himself.) More generally but also personally, I feel like several times in my life (including now) I have been in bad situations where the world just does not seem to have a solution to my problem, where no amount of google-fu, reading books, seeking societally-established forms of help (therapists, doctors, etc.) has helped. The only way out seems to be to do original thinking.
I also want to highlight that the mental motions of Correctness reasoning seems to be susceptible to the dark arts (to be clear, I think Habryka himself is smart enough to avoid this kind of thing, but I want to highlight this for others). I feel this most whenever I go on Twitter. Like, I go on there thinking “ok, for whatever reason many people (even Wei Dai now, apparently) are discoursing on here now, so I better read it to not fall behind, I better enlarge my hypothesis space by taking in new ideas and increase the range of thoughts I can think!” (this is the kind of thing I mean by “mental motions of Correctness reasoning”—I am mainly motivated by making my map bigger, not making it more detailed). But then after a while I feel like the social environment is tugging me to feel a certain way, value certain things, believe certain things (or else I’m a bad person) (maybe I only had this line of thought because Qiaochu tugged me in a certain direction!). I started out wanting to just explore and try to make my map Correct, but turns out the territory contained adversarial computations… This sort of thing, it seems to me, is even worse for the non-LessWrong population. Again it seems to me most healthy to mostly just be thinking for myself and then periodically check in on Twitter discourse to see what’s up (this is aspirational).
Update: The flashcards have finally been released: https://riceissa.github.io/immune-book/