I may be fully ignorant of well known facts here, but I really want to ask.

We’ve been hearing nonstop about face masks’ impact on interpersonal interactions via hiding expressions, and the supposed harm therein. Most of it has been relating to children and learning in school settings, but it has branched out to include the population at large.

Is there a genuine concern or anything resembling a consensus in respectable scientific circles that this is a serious potential harm of facial PPE that could outweigh their utility, and that this should give us pause about the decision to have utilized it so broadly during the Covid pandemic?

I get that it’s a theoretical harm, and maybe there’s now some evidence that bears it out. But quantitatively how much of a harm is it? When we talk about rise in mental illness, learning deficits in children, personal isolation, I can think of about a billion other confounding variables that could have contributed to these other than “we lost our sense of connection to strangers in public because we periodically were unable to see their facial expressions.”

I feel like there was a strong demand for something to put under the “harms” column with masks, given that they were and are widely seen as basically a zero risk intervention.

When I’m seeing stuff about how periodic inability to see facial expressions is causing widespread harm, it feels like it’s coming mostly from one particular crowd, and has a strong “post hoc” flavor to it.

But I could be dead ass wrong here.

>there really aren’t any major competing theories any more.

This is false. Food intolerances, medication side effects, SIBO and motility issues are all potential underlying causes of IBS other that neurochemical imbalances.

Where is your source of a major medical body declaring that DGBI is the sole cause of IBS to the exclusion of all others?

> And we already know IBS is a syndrome related to disordered gut-brain interaction

I respectfully have to take issue with this statement.

We know that modulation of neurochemicals can modulate GI symptoms, and/or perception of GI symptoms in certain patients and we know that there is a connection between certain kinds of gut-brain signaling, but to say that this is the original causal mechanism behind IBS isn’t founded. It’s one proposed model of IBS, one of many.

Just proving the concept that these pathways are active in GI symptom perception doesn’t prove that this is the root cause. It merely proves that these pathways can be leveraged as potential treatments.

They need to make sure beer is in season.