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Josef Pace / Physiopoint's avatar

I fully agree with your comparisons. Homo sapiens has adapted itself into a fake environment resulting in evolution drift and change as per Darwin's theories of evolution in different species. Man is today driven by consumerism and false realities of instant short-lived gratification. It is difficult to prove this objectively but I believe that homosapiens will eventually go full circle to auto distruction. Clinical experience of 25 years convinces me of your observations and the fact that we have forgotten how to move due to new comforts and technology our nervous system has maladapted to this pandemic of epic proportions with resultant chronic pain and illness.

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Midge's avatar

I’ve seen the hygiene hypothesis updated to the old friends hypothesis:

https://www.grahamrook.net/OldFriends/oldfriends.html

Especially as we grow more aware of the propensity of certain pathogens to trigger prolonged immune derangement, it’s clear that more stressors ≠ more better. If a stressor seems to have a relieving effect, why?

For example, when people seek out “helminth therapy” (infection with helminths in hopes of therapeutic benefit) for immune derangements like atopy, they’re seeking out *helminth* therapy, not “any infection will do” therapy. Helminths have evolved tricks for downregulating their hosts’ immune system in order to survive in their hosts better. Attempting “COVID therapy” for immune downregulation seems more likely to backfire spectacularly than actually work.

While atopy and autoimmunity could be anthropomorphized as “bored immune system with nothing better to do starts attacking the wrong thing”, once those diseases are established, the immune system becomes quite busy — not bored at all! Moreover, such diseases cause considerable mundane discomfort, even with modern treatments. If these diseases could reduce chronic pain simply by being stressors, by introducing some (these days, often) manageable discomfort into people’s lives, then people with these diseases would have less chronic pain, but instead they have more.

Paul Ingraham at PainScience points out that the relieving effect of many therapies, including exercise, massage, and counter-irritation, may be due, not to irritant effects as such, but to sheer novel sensation. Sensation which, while it may not be entirely comfortable (“hurts so good” is a thing), is (ideally) not threatening.

It occurs to me that escaping our modern lives by living rough for a while bombards us with all sorts of novel sensation, only some of which is unpleasant, and whose net effect (for those of us who enjoy it enough to keep doing it) is pleasant.

It is, of course, also true that discomfort borne in pursuit of something desirable causes less suffering than discomfort that seems unrelated to or even opposed to achieving our goals.

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