Month: November 2023

Inositol Non-Results

Three months ago I suggested people consider inositol for treating combined vague mood issues and vague stomach issues. I knew a few people who’d really benefited from it, and when one talked about it on his popular Twitter account several more people popped up thanking him for the suggestion, because it fixed their lives too. But those reports didn’t come with a denominator, which made it hard to estimate the success rate; I was hoping mentioning it on my blog and doing a formal follow-up to capture the non-responders would give a more accurate number.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get enough people to do anything useful. I received 7 responses, of which 3 didn’t have digestive issues and thus weren’t really the target. The low response rate might be a consequence of giving the wrong link in the original follow-up post, or maybe it just wasn’t that interesting. I’m reporting the results anyway out of a sense of civic virtue. 

Of those 4 remaining responses:

  • 2 rated it exactly 5 out of 10 (neutral)
  • 1 rated it as 6, which was not strong enough for them to try it a third time.
  • 1 rated it as 3- not bad enough that they spontaneously noticed a problem, but they did detailed mood tracking and the linear regression was clearly bad. 

That response rate isn’t really low enough to prove anything except that anything with a real effect can hurt you, and the value of detailed data. So for now we just have David’s estimate that 5% of people he inspired to take inositol benefited from it. 

Follow-up survey: inositol

Two months ago I wrote about inositol as a treatment that occasionally works for anxiety and depression, especially when the user also has weird digestive issues (not medical advice, I am not a doctor). If that inspired you to try inositol I would love if you would fill out this 5-7 question survey about your experience. This follow-up data helps other people considering inositol, and is broadly helpful to me in figuring out what luck based medicine looks like. 

And to the four people who already filled this out: gold star for epistemic virtue. 

The survey doesn’t allow for a lot of detail, which I know is painful for some people (it’s me. I’m people). If you would like to share more, feel free to write up as much as you’d like in a comment here, or share a link detailing your experience.

Elsewhere in luck based medicine: it was a dude in my survey, but I met a few more people who really love the Apollo Neuro. They are all the kind of people who already know what “somatically aware” or “embodiment” mean, so this is some support for my theory that that’s a prerequisite. It’s still an open question if you need that background for the Neuro to be beneficial, to notice it’s beneficial, or to stick with it long enough that it has time to be beneficial. 

The Apollo app has gotten even worse since last time I wrote. Every time I open it it bugs me to enable notifications, a permission it absolutely does not need.