I saw someone on hexbear mention it a while ago, and went on my own research rabbit hole. It seems pretty cool, and I believe it could cure diseases and increase health in general, it’s just hard. The jist is a Soviet doctor named Buteyko realized breathing less and increasing CO2 in one’s body can greatly improve health. His method is to do lots of breath exercises, stay active, and eat healthily. I’ve been doing 15 minutes of exercises everyday for a few weeks, but it’s slow, and my control pause is a terrible 9 (probably part of why I’m always tired. Fuck school for making me wake up at an unnatural time and making me sit so long). The people around me irl that I’ve mentioned it to seem to think it’s too hard or a waste of time. For better or worse, I’m also a modernist, believing in human “perfectibility” with the right conditions and influences.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buteyko/comments/c8px11/start_here_intro_faq_of_rbuteyko/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/fjh47l/a_buddhist_monks_experience_with_buteyko/
What do you think? Is it legit? Do any of you practice?
Not legit at all. We don't even need to analyze it deep. Just with rudimentary high school biology. CO2 is a waste product of your cells. It interferes with many processes including respiration itself. Your body goes through a lot of effort to remove it. You shouldn't be trying to increase it. It's like drinking your own pee.
The problem with that argument for me is that it feels like the anti-trans argument “in biology everyone learned that there are two genders (sexes) and you’re born one of them. how dare you say there’s more to it than that.” I learned how CO2 is a waste product of cellular respiration but maybe it also plays an important role and so on, idk I’m not as arrogant to say I know enough just from basic school knowledge.
You yourself have just made the mistake that conservatives make though. You conflated gender and sex by putting sex in parentheses next to gender as if they are the same thing.
Biology makes no mention of gender, that is a sociological and anthropological phenomenon. Biology states that besides incredibly rare niche cases, there are two main distinct sexes in humans as demonstrated by the XX and XY chromosomal combinations.
Gender is not sex. Sex is not gender. Gender identity is a human construct.
Nowhere does biology state there are two genders.
Further, cellular respiration is a biological process that has been studied for hundreds of years and is thoroughly understood. Do you really think that no one… not a single person or research group beyond this single quack would have blown the lid on what would be one of the most significant biological discoveries in history?
I understand that, allow me to clarify. What I meant is we are taught that one is either XX or XY with certain sexual characteristics. In reality there is a lot of variation beyond that norm and things can be altered.
I thought maybe the body evolved to need and make use of CO2 as a product of that necessary process, and now modern life has prevented that process from working properly (it’s simply true that most people don’t exercise nearly as much as hunter gatherers etc). I suppose it would be groundbreaking and well known if it was really as important and had the role Buteyko says, and that wouldn’t remain secret.
How is there a lot of variation between the two and how can they be altered? You didn’t learn about those “variations” because they are irrelevant to human biology except for researchers and doctors, since such cases are incredibly rare and not the norm. The rule is set by the constant, not the exception.
There are niche cases of XXY or other chromosomal deformities, however the body simply exhibits the primary sexual characteristics of a single sex. There is no such thing as a true hermaphrodite with both sex’s physical characteristics, and the body will only display secondary sexual traits while sometimes erroneously trying to develop a second primary set that are always non-functional, and often harmful.
The gender identity of an intersex person is essentially wholly irrelevant and determined on an individual basis.
I agree, but do you get my thought process of “maybe there’s more to cellular respiration than I thought?”
I see what you mean, but you have to remember that you can’t go into something like this “looking for the hidden answer” and then disregarding what millions of scientists say when the information you find didn’t actually fit the hidden meaning you hoped to find.
It’s the same hole that anti-vaxxers and flat earthers fall into.
Like the advanced math example you gave earlier. You can find the i example in higher level textbooks… guess what you won’t find in higher level biology textbooks?
Also Econ isn’t a science.
Yeah. Not my meme btw.
You're not taking into account that there is actual science behind these claims.
And for political science, it's of course a lot less science and a lot more history and interpretation.
Of course, we teach kids simple things in order to allow them to step through science to the more advanced stuff. But the fact is when you want to debate medicine like this, you need real evidence. And a junk study that has never had a follow-up is not evidence-based medicine.
For example, the gender and sex thing is an overly simplistic way of explaining a more complicated process. But the actual science about that more complicated process exists. The advanced science about CO2 in the blood is junk. We can analyze this from an evidence-based medicine perspective. This is not real science.
For all of its faults, there is a reasonably high quality, evidenced-based way of doing real science and evidence-based medicine. And I'm sorry, this is pretty clear cut, but this is not real science.
This is the strategy for junk science and fake medicine practitioners around the world. To claim that their work is actually on the cusp of discovering something new, even if the idea is 50, 100, or 1000 years old.
We can talk all day about how evidence-based medicine is impersonal and doctors just aren't good with their patients and they're pushing people away into the alternative medicine industry. But the fact of the matter is that evidence-based medicine is medicine and this is not.