Cursed Knowledge is free for everyone to access. You can grab the mp3 file below, or you can subscribe at:
Cursed Knowledge is our podcast that explores how narratives, for better and worse, have shaped our world without us noticing. The world is full of people pushing their version of reality on us and it’s time to expose the truth. No matter how much you might wish we hadn’t.
Allergies. We either have them or know some one who does. Ranging from life threatening to mildly irritating, they’re one of life’s constant annoyances. And they’re getting worse. We have more allergies now than ever before. Rusty Guinn joins Cursed Knowledge to talk about why allergies are more common, and if there’s anything we can do about it.
Nice back and forth, very much a reality to those of us who know that allergies isn’t just a great tune by Paul Simon, and why Costco sells cetirizine and loratidine in 365-dose packages.
The much darker reality that underlies this is the increasing prevalence of more serious auto-immune disorders like lupus, Crohn’s, MS, and any number of others.
Well done!
You covered a lot of ground, and I would like to attempt to connect this topic to our current political situation.
Immunology is an immensely complicated field within medicine. It affects most all of our biological systems and there is so much which is not known, as you and Rusty pointed out, and the novel stimuli/triggers such as foods and chemicals have grown immensely in variety and now travel the globe easily.
Most people cannot comprehend the idea that individuals of the same race, culture, geography, and even family can have significantly different immune responses to the same introduced substance. That’s not abnormal!
Immune systems within individuals can vary based on genealogy and many of the reasons in the podcast, and the immunological responses follow suit. There are so many variables that prediction in the individual to novel stimuli is all but impossible.
So you use statistics, probabilities, and gather data on large numbers of people. That’s a big part of Public Health and data can be very good, but how does it apply to the individual?
Can’t tell until you….take the vaccine (to choose an example). It might be very beneficial to the public at large, but to the individual? Unknown. This is one of the reasons why some of us are in solid favor of vaccination but are uncomfortable with mandates.
Now throw in Social media, RFK Jr., general ignorance on a complex subject, fear, political opportunism and KABOOM! Mistrust grows and it seeps into many other arenas.
The Widening Gyre gets wider as human attention, intellectual capacity, and spare time get maxxed out.
Thanks for this segment Harper