Alan Levinovitz

But like, what reason would there ever be for them to change their belief about CTOs?

It's nothing but good to them to have this belief.

Like, I don't know.

I don't know what it would take to convince them.

And I'm not really sure that we should be convincing them to change their minds.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm glad I'm not a medical professional.

This stuff is really tricky, especially because as you know, the diet world, someone will do something or the child rearing world or whatever, any of these worlds where we're desperate for answers and we see connections like the nutritional world, your stomach hurts, you change your diet, you feel better for three days.

You're like, oh my God, I finally figured it out.

I'm feeling better.

I'm never adding that food back in.

So now it's working for you, but you're also scared.

So what does fear and anxiety do?

It creates precisely the same symptoms that gastrointestinal symptoms that you're afraid of in the first place.

So you can end up, I think, especially with diet, but also in any area of your life.

trapping yourself in a world of correlations that make you feel safe and seem to have worked for you.

Again, in the WIRED piece, I don't get into this, but I also talked to a lot of severely ill patients who had terrifyingly complicated biomedical protocols.

They were taking

five different prescription medicines.

They were taking a slew of supplements.