zlacker

>>ivank+(OP)
A recent Cochrane review found very little high quality evidence in either direction:

http://www.cochrane.org/CD011269/DEPRESSN_light-therapy-prev...

It's not clear to me why light therapy is considered as a well-researched treatment.

>>sambe+Ad1
From the review, they found 2986 unique papers on the subject, they then assessed 91 papers from the 2986. From these 91, only 1 had a rigorous double blind testing but on only 46 people. The exposures for the light source was 2500 lux, IR light and no special treatment. The results were not significant.

So, lot-researched but maybe not well-enough researched.

>>Loic+cg1
How do you go about blinding a study which does or does not shine a bright light in subject's faces?

>>bradle+gh1
I'm guessing you vary the intensity and spectrum of the light. If the treatment doesn't show a dose-response curve of some kind, then it probably just doesn't work.

Standard academic disclaimer applies: This isn't my field of study, and I'm sure there are many subtle mistakes in what I just said.

>>Menger+Jh1
A quick Google confirms this: they use either an identical-looking light with a different response, or a different light altogether. "Here's a light, here's a sugar pill, log your mood please..."

As silly as that all sounds, it's already a million times better than what this guy did. He took the "if a little is ineffective a LOT will be better" approach and built a damn lighthouse in his living room. And if the goal is a DIY project and a blog post, OF COURSE you'll feel better after "your treatment." It's approaching group therapy at that point. There's a lot of this crap on HN lately.

>>tacos+fi1
I don't think that would actually be a million times better.

If we want to get to the reality where confidence in the efficacy of things is well-founded on rigorous experimentation and analysis, then we need to get there, one step at a time. Instead of tearing people down and saying that their efforts to improve themselves is crap, you could be offering constructive criticism. Even just bring up one question that would have made it a better experiment, so that when a reader here decides to copy him, they can do it better. Maybe they'll even share their personal experience and propagate more experimentation? If enough people do that, maybe collectively we'll one day have the interest and funding to have better studies done.

Would you rather he have not done the build, not shared it with the internet? Maybe he could have been more like the status quo and consumed someone else's product, quietly?

This post and your post yesterday where you argued 2700K screen temperature late in ones day is NOT less straining than 5800K, because if that were true, movie theatres would play all their movies with screens at 2700K... makes me think you're not really interested in people improving their quality of life, you just want to argue.

>>dota_f+0u1
Author anonymously makes unsupported claims, disparages competing products, provides no science, and wrote the post for profit. Nothing can be built on this, because his work is built on sand. "Type up a blog post" is not the important part of the scientific method. Pointing out pseudoscience and invalid methods and data may be the most constructive criticism of all.

Enthusiasm is great. Enthusiasm masquerading as medical treatment is not.