> Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.
I don't believe this study for a second based on personal experience. It sounds about as trustworthy as tobacco-is-harmless and fat-not-sugar studies of the past.
This is why people don’t take your claims seriously. If you aren’t even willing to consider an opposing viewpoint, why should anyone consider yours? What’s the point in having a discussion?
Clearly you have some kind of hypersensitivity to indoor environments. I’m not convinced it’s VOCs. They’ve been with us for a long time now, spanning a few generations, and life expectancy is only increasing. Maybe I’m wrong; I’m open to that possibility.
On the hand, the only other people I’ve met with issues similar to yours have allergic histamine reactions to particulates that are benign to everyone else. Like dust and grass. I have a friend that gets a shot every few months for it, and doesn’t have a problem when treated. Have you considered speaking with a doctor?
I don't have allergies, and I am not sensitive to indoor envornments by themselves. I just get very tired and a migraine-like reaction when exposed to synthetic cleaning products and new furniture, as far as recently.
I don't need scientific consensus to prove it to me, I live it myself.
People I am close with do take me seriously, and the problem is fixed when the VOCs are taken away.
You aren't receiving pushback from people who are attempting to deny your experience. I don't think anybody here doubts the experiences you have mentioned.
Instead people are questioning your analysis of the root cause. You can be meaningfully and honestly impacted and also be wrong about why you are having trouble. Even in the most extreme case where somebody wants to claim you effectively experiencing the placebo effect, that does not detract from the realness of your issue.
I think many people have trouble really groking this separation. Questioning the root cause can often feel like questioning the problem. Additionally it is easy to become attached to an explanation that may be faulty. Humans are not well-evolved to be perfectly rational and completely detached observers of their own lives. And faulty explanations don't necessarily cause faulty solutions, which can make things even harder to disentangle.
However I think it's important to try to keep in mind that all of these aspects are distinct in important ways despite being related. It is possible to question or even refute these aspects individually without casting aspersions on the other aspects. You can have a real problem, and a working solution, and still be completely wrong about why. That's fine, and actually pretty normal.
What are you saying, that because some VOCs are found in nature, any man-made VOC is OK too, just because it is part of the same chemical compound family?
Just for the record, VOCs are literally "anything organic that boils at less than 250°C" (in the EU).
Farts are full of VOCs. No, seriously, every time I fart the TVOC sensor in my air purifier goes nuts, as does the one in my air quality meter. It's almost like the thing is shaming me for it :)
I would encourage you to learn more about the different types of VOCs, and at which concentrations they are known to be harmful. You might be having true allergic reactions to some harmless VOCs. You might be having psychosomatic reactions to other VOCs. You might not be having reactions to some harmful VOCs at all. Lumping it all together into "VOCs" is not helpful.
Wait a minute, so you're telling me when I was laughing with my husband about how we should fart in front of the new air purifier and see if the sensor went off and he dismissed me, rolled his eyes and called me juvenile THAT I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG?!?!?
I don't know that we know enough to know that. It's certainly true that there are "natural" VOC's that can be harmful, and man-made VOC's that are not known to be harmful. I wouldn't necessarily presume that sensitivity is directly correlated to harm.
The study may be true on average but not in every particular case. The way we do most medical studies today, with relatively small samples and coarse aggregate statistics, isn't well-suited to detecting rare but genuine issues with a high false positive rate.
There are also two major issues with science today.
The first is that a lot of studies are simply careless. They use a "placebo" which has a scent to give the indication that there is something there, but then the "placebo" unintentionally contains VOCs. Or the lab's janitor uses them to clean the lab, things like that.
The second is that a lot of studies are funded by people with agendas. It's all too easy to get an invalid result by accident, much less on purpose.
See also replication crisis.
So then you either have to know and trust the authors of the study or spend the time to go through it with a fine toothed comb and find replications from independent scientists before you can trust it. Which nobody really has the time to do, so the default position becomes to dismiss anything the reader disagrees with.
You don't get to throw away opposing evidence because it does not agree with the point you're attempting to sell. You don't actually want to have a conversation, you just want to push an agenda.
Building a powerful sandbox that maintains anonymity is a difficult problem. The statement that CSS is overpowered is clickbait for a different argument.
Quantity of smoke inhaled is several orders of magnitude smaller than with cigarettes. There's some evidence to suggest that, whether due to quantity or other factors, smoking marijuana casually does not substantially harm lung function[1].
Tobacco companies said the opposite of what their studies showed--so they lied.
Claiming that marijuana is typically smoked orders of magnitude less than cigarettes is not at all a lie but is truly one of the main reasons marijuana doesn't lead to the same lung cancer rates as cigarettes.
Back of the napkin math:
Imagine the average smoker smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. 20 cigarettes in a pack and 15 drags per cigarette = 300 drags of smoke per day.
A moderate (or even heavy) marijuana user smokes a bowl or two per day and takes ~4 hits per bowl = 8 drags a day.
Plus marijuana is not addictive like cigarettes so the number of casual marijuana users who can remain once-in-a-while partakers is much higher than with cigarettes. And if funds are tight it's easier for people to stop spending their money on marijuana than on cigarettes. Marijuana's cost on society is overall a lot lower than the societal cost of cigarettes.
Just for some perspective here because I'm not ashamed of myself...
Two bowls per day I'd consider light usage (less than a bowl a day I'd say is very light, or occasional). Heavy users are smoking over an ounce a week, which is greater than an eighth a day. That's quite a few more than two bowls.
At my height I was smoking between 8-12 king size spliffs per day. Though a spliff is mixed with tobacco.
I was a very heavy user, but I was also not that exceptional for the area (PDX).
I still smoke, even though it's likely bad for me. Like drinking, you don't do it for the positive health effects, you do it because it's fun, social, or you simply want to...
you're the cannabis equivalent of a 3 pack a day tobacco smoker. the very high end of extremely heavy usage. the average cannabis user is probably smoking like 1 joint per week, honestly. a daily user maybe smokes 1 joint per day. very few people have jobs where they can be stoned all day.
Do you have any facts to back this up? I just don't think the average marijuana user only uses a single joint in a week. I've known a lot of people who smoke and that amount seems off.
And a lot more people than you'd expect are stoned all day. You just can't tell because they're past the giggling munchies phase of smoking.
I really wish I had better data I could link to you. Just reporting my intuition based on personal experience, and knowing a lot of cannabis users. For obvious reasons, it's not so easy to find good methodically rigorous longitudinal studies of cannabis use.
It definitely is, but there are also compounds in marijuana that seem to inhibit cancers (citation needed). From memory, the result is that you can still get lung cancer, but the rate of it is much lower than would be expected.
On Safari, both of these examples flash the underlying panel before the transition takes place. On Firefox, the transition is quite choppy. Is this just me? (I'm sure there's a simple fix, i.e. maybe one of the layers isn't getting composited the whole time...)
Thanks for pointing those out! Indeed we have to make extra corrections to make it work correctly on Safari, but the examples left those out to try to make them easier to follow.
What version of Firefox are you using? The first example I find to definitely be choppier on Firefox, but the last one looks pretty good.
Oddly enough, removing the outer raf (on line 59) will remove the flicker in Safari but then break the animation in firefox. I'll see if I can figure that out, I must have a bug somewhere. We actually don't use the outer raf in our codebase and it works fine in both browsers.
On Safari I really don't see much of a transition. The content suddenly appears with some flashing. Certainly not seeing anything that looks like an accordion.
> Blinded clinical trials show that people with MCS react as often and as strongly to placebos as they do to chemical stimuli; the existence and severity of symptoms is seemingly related to perception that a chemical stimulus is present.