melatonin
Article
melatonin is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between November 24, 2021 and September 12, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “lots of other different compounds: zinc, hydroxychloroquine, quercetin, nigella sativa, melatonin”; “given everything I know about ivermectin - and Vitamin D, melatonin, etc - I still think on net the very small chance that this stuff helps you is higher than the extremely small chance it kills you”; “melatonin (a harmless sleep supplement, I take it every night, eight unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID)“. It most often appears alongside FDA, California, COVID.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: November 24, 2021
- Last seen: September 12, 2024
Appears In
- Pascalian Medicine
- Open Thread 201
- Highlights From The Comments On Supplement Labeling
- Beyond “Abolish The FDA”
- Links For September 2024
Related Pages
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- FDA (3 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- COVID (2 shared issues)
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- curcumin (2 shared issues)
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- ivermectin (2 shared issues)
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- Vitamin D (2 shared issues)
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- @halomancer1 (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Adderall (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandros Marinos (1 shared issues)
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- Algernon’s Law (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But what’s true of curcumin is equally true of lots of other different compounds: zinc, hydroxychloroquine, quercetin, nigella sativa, melatonin…just going off the ones on the sidebar of ivmmeta.com, there are about thirty different things that have this same level of very early, very dubious super-promising COVID results. Some are expensive and some are dangerous, but I think about twenty of them are cheap and safe.
But I have to admit that given everything I know about ivermectin - and Vitamin D, melatonin, etc - I still think on net the very small chance that this stuff helps you is higher than the extremely small chance it kills you. Even if the latter isn’t quite zero.
2: Some good discussion on my Pascalian Medicine post, see especially David Chapman’s tweets and Jay Daigle’s blog. But I do feel like some the responses flirt with assuming everything has the most convenient possible value to fit a morality tale. Suppose someone you love gets COVID, and you have the option to either recommend or disrecommend that they take a cocktail of melatonin (a harmless sleep supplement, I take it every night, eight unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID), curcumin (a harmless-when-sourced-correctly spice, six unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID) and Vitamin D (a harmless vitamin, twelve unreliable studies have shown it treats COVID). What do you do, here, in the real world? I’m honestly not sure, and I think my discomfort with this question is a lot more interesting than some too-pat fable about The Rationalist Who Thought The Real World Was Exactly Like A Casino.
The supplements I find more interesting are things like melatonin for sleep, ashwagandha or silexan for anxiety, SAMe for depression, or caffeine + theanine for focus. All of these are useful, supported by studies, and good alternatives to medications that some people don’t tolerate well. I’m using mental health examples because that’s the subject I know about, but there are probably examples in other fields too (probiotics for digestive problems).
Inline links: silexan
My best guess is that this is one traditional Chinese medicine shaman guy in Chicago selling some supplements he made himself, mostly in his own office but also partly syndicated through local stores. Between 2016 and 2019 he screwed up and included way too much lead and poisoned three local children. And this is the example everybody gives to indict the entire supplement industry forever, and to try to scare you off from buying melatonin at Whole Foods.
(before answering, read my posts on fish oil and melatonin)
14: Why did Egyptian pharaohs so often marry their sisters? David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time. Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low. What they really wanted was to avoid having to marry royal-line women off to anyone else - who could then create their own branches of the royal dynasty with competing claims to the throne. 15: The ominously named “cerebrolysin” has a positive reputation in the nootropics community, but Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive and find that its manufacturing process is so poor that it ends up being mostly random amino acids - ie it can’t possibly work the way its proponents suggest. Interestingly, cerebrolysin performed about the same as some definitely-real chemicals (eg melatonin, nicotine) on my old nootropics survey, re-emphasizing that most of what the survey measures is placebo effects. 16: Why is the Ukraine war a horrible grinding war of attrition like World War I, instead of resembling more dynamic modern conflicts? I asked this on an Open Thread and got some good answers: PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.