Preventative Logic
For someone who understands quantum situations in which effect can precede cause I really don’t understand people who take certain allegedly preventative actions to stop things from happening that they have no certainty will happen.
Take Echinacea. Or rather don’t. In order to be effective you have to take it BEFORE you get sick. But how do you know, with any degree of certainty, if you were even going to get sick in the first place? Some people swear by it I’ve heard but I think any claims of effectiveness are fallacy.
Think of it this way, let’s say you get sick on average 3-4 times a year. If you were to take it every day, even if it had no effect, you could report it working 90% of the time. Now if it were a vitamin that would be good for you anyways, like vitamin C, I could get behind it but from my research indicates that it loses effectiveness over time of continued used. So it’s efficacy is based on your ability to accurately predict when you’ll get sick.
If I could predict the future that well I’d win the lottery and stop working so taking sick days wouldn’t really matter.
And before you Echinacea-lovers out there accuse me of not fact-checking, the wikipedia page on the subject says “clinical efficacy has not been established” and further goes on to say “doses must be taken every two to four hours after the first dose, including every two to four hours during the overnight sleeping period, until the cold symptoms have disappeared (generally within 24 hours.) The scientific studies stated above appear to disagree with these claims as ad hoc rationalising; if the cold doesn’t go away when expected, the patient can always be blamed for not following the strict regimen, and the product is never to blame. This is known as subjective validation.”
I rest my case.
Let’s take another example, taking Tylenol BEFORE getting a headache. Apparently it’s more effective that way but my previous questions still stand and what’s worse is that Tylenol isn’t good for you. Prolonged used can damage your stomach if memory serves. Yes Aspirin can help prevent blood clots by acidifying your blood but if you’re not at risk then it’s probably not a good idea to take it without cause.
So you could take Echinacea or Tylenol whenever you think you may get sick or have a headache but when is that not a possibility? Guessing wrong lowers the effectiveness by increasing your tolerance and then it won’t be as effective when you really need it. So then you have to get extra strength which only increases both the cost and the risk.
The fact is you can’t predict the future but thinking that you can may lead you to make bad decisions that could hurt you over time. So perhaps we should wait until the problem actually occurs before taking dangerous, harmful, and costly steps to allegedly prevent it.
It’s that kind of logic that took the US to Iraq.
So the next time someone uses the argument, “is it better to wait for the problem to happen before doing something about it?” take a moment and truly consider if the answer might be yes. If it’s healthy like vitamins or the environment then go ahead but if there’s a risk factor think twice and make your peace with the fact that you can neither predict nor control the future in many situations.
