Alternative Medicine as a Coping Mechanism

You will probably not regrow all of your hair with emu oil

A lot of online health advice is just people coping.

They’re not trying to mislead you necessarily - they just really want their weird remedies to work, so they hallucinate success when it doesn’t exist. You see this all the time with hairloss remedies - people swearing up and down they regrew hair by pouring a bunch of emu oil on their scalp or something.

“No sorry I don’t have progress photos, I forgot to take them. But it’s clear to everyone how much thicker my hair is after massaging emu oil into my scalp twice daily. And they would never lie to me about something like this after realizing I was unhealthily fixated on it, so I’m highly confident it’s true.”

It gets even worse when the commonly-recommended solution is scary. With hairloss, it’s finasteride side effects. Nobody wants to get erectile dysfunction, and there are lots of scary stories about “post finasteride syndrome,” where people report to just have developed permanent erectile dysfunction even after quitting the drug.

People see that and go “Ahhh! Surely there’s some solution that WON’T permanently castrate me, right?”

That need causes them to be extremely charitable with all the alternative solutions they read about, to the extent that they commonly placebo themselves into becoming the emu oil guy from the example above.

Another example is gynecomastia (manboobs)

Medically-interesting but offputting imagery removed out of respect for my subscribers

It’s an enlargement of the breast gland behind the nipple. Something like 50% of men now have some degree of this, but it’s not always bad enough to be visible. It can occur naturally, as a consequence of steroids, hormonal imbalance and probably some other things I’m forgetting.

Fun fact - if you whack your head hard enough and in the right way, you can sometimes tilt out your pituitary gland enough to get it. If you hit it juuuust right, you may wind up only getting it in one nipple. And for whatever reason, when you only get it on one side, it’s more likely to be the left.

The average man obviously doesn’t enjoy the idea of having breasts (though this is changing in recent times) and starts looking for ways to get rid of them.

Upon searching for an answer, he finds that surgery is the standard recommendation.

“Gahh. I don’t want surgery, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like I’m fully a woman yet. Surely there has to be some way I can just tone this down a bit without going under the knife. I just need to reduce them like one cup size or so and I think I’ll be back into acceptable territory.”

So he searches more, and finds a bunch of bodybuilders recommending he take tamoxifen and reassuring him that they definitely solve the issue as long as you stick with it. Mixed in with this commentary is also one jacked 36 year old steroid veteran saying “Just get the surgery bro, trust me.”

He ignores the steroid veteran completely. He doesn’t even intend to - his brain just automatically filters the reply out because he doesn’t want to hear it.

“Finally, some reasonable non-surgical solutions to my breasts. I will order all the stuff they recommended and start taking it immediately.”

So he gets his tamoxifen from some Chinese research chemical vendor, mixed up right in some 19-year-old’s bathtub. He starts taking the chemicals and diligently feeling his nipples every morning when he wakes up for signs of breast shrinkage.

After a week or two, he makes an account on the forum to let them all know that he’s certain his breast glands feel smaller now. He’s asked for progress pics - he replies that no, he has no pictures, but he’s certain his breasts are smaller now.

He might have even been right. In cases of active glandular growth, tamoxifen can shrink the gland a bit and prevent it from feeling sensitive to the touch. It just doesn’t remove the existing fibrotic tissue, so there’s a limit to how much you can shrink the gland.

After some number of months or years, he hits that limit, decides “whatever, I guess this is good enough” and stops taking the drugs. He doesn’t post anything about this on the forum because he’s mentally checked out at this point. He also suspects the tamoxifen is responsible for the way he’s been feeling like shit, and he’s eager to be done with it.

But a month or three after quitting, the nipple sensitivity comes back. He didn’t actually change the conditions that caused it in the first place, so why wouldn’t it?

He starts researching again. He reads through all the same threads he skimmed the first time, but this time his brain actually registers the jacked 36yo telling him to just cut the tits off and be done with it. And actually, it’s not just one - there’s a whole swarm of these people he somehow missed before!

“Just get gyno surgery bro. This other shit is a waste of time.”

“Get the surgery and be done with it.”

“I got the surgery 18 years ago I aint had issues since just cut it off man”

He even finds a comment he wrote 9 months ago telling people that the surgery isn’t necessary, because taking the Chinese cancer drugs ‘worked fine for him.’

After some reading, he realizes you can get the surgery marked down under a breast cancer code for insurance, and they’ll do the whole thing for like $800. The alternative is taking tamoxifen for the rest of his life just to maintain his breasts at their current size, so he bites the bullet and calls up a surgeon.

Two weeks later he’s in the operating room for a 45 minute procedure which he recovers from in approximately five days. His nipples have never looked better, and he deeply regrets how much time and money he wasted on the tamoxifen cope before deciding to do this.

He logs back on to the forum one last time to leave a comment. “Just get the surgery guys. Stop coping with the Chinese horseshit and just get the surgery.”

The next guy ignores it completely and buys a bottle of tamoxifen.