“Nobody, nobody other than a neurosurgeon, understands what it is like to have to drag yourself up to the ward and see, every day—sometimes for months on end—somebody one has destroyed and face the anxious and angry family at the bedside.” The schoolteacher lived on in just this way. 7 years after that failed surgery, Marsh was visiting a home for vegetative patients when he looked into a room and “saw his grey curled-up body in its bed.”
Tag: medicine
Bioethics will kill us all
We have ideological biases that say, “we shouldn’t be meddling with nature” In China, 95% of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference
As of 2021-07-01, things are even worse:
Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still 100K of lives.)
1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. 2 of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. 10s of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.
Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.
The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40K volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.
Hospital alert fatigue
Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts, an average of 1 alarm beeping by the bedside every 8 minutes. For the entire month, there were 381560 alarms across the 5 ICUs. If you add the inaudible alerts, there were 2.5M unique alarms in 1 month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false
Host tolerance
Instead of focusing on how to kill specific pathogens, THoR seeks to catalyze the development of breakthrough interventions that would increase the ability of patients’ own bodies to tolerate a broad range of pathogens. The program will explore the fundamental biology of host tolerance in animal populations with the goal of expanding treatment options for humans in the future.
DEKA Arm System
useful for that climber who had to cut off his own arm.
Viral RNA decoded
A code hidden in single-stranded RNA viruses tells the virus how to pack itself within its outer shell of proteins. the code causes >1B infections every year and there’s a chance to disrupt it.
Lab-grown bacteria breakthrough
a more literate article about the recent progress in culturing the 99% of bacteria that don’t grow in lab conditions.
This idea of going after cryptic bacterial strains has been around for a long time, but getting it to work has been another thing entirely. This is the most solid example that I’m aware of, and I hope that it’s just the opening of a new platform for antibiotic drug discovery. The traditional search for natural product antibiotics has pretty well come to a shuddering halt over the years – no matter how much effort you put into increasingly exotic soil samples and the like, you keep finding the same things (if you find anything at all). Unculturable organisms are the new frontier, and the iChip is going to be nowhere near the last word in exploring it. And at the same time, you have outfits like Warp Drive Bio trying to get organisms to express unusual compounds that aren’t normally seen, so the hope is that there are a lot of useful things out there that that we have never heard of.
Fexaramine
Unlike most diet pills on the market, this new pill, called fexaramine, doesn’t dissolve into the blood like appetite suppressants or caffeine-based diet drugs, but remains in the intestines, causing fewer side effects. “It sends out the same signals that normally happen when you eat a lot of food, so the body starts clearing out space to store it. But there are no calories and no change in appetite.” Evans’ laboratory has spent 20 years studying the farensoid X receptor (FXR), a protein that plays a role in how the body releases bile acids from the liver, digests food and stores fats and sugars. The human body turns on FXR at the beginning of a meal, to prepare for an influx of food. FXR not only triggers the release of bile acids for digestion, but also changes blood sugar levels and causes the body to burn some fats in preparation for the incoming meal.
Modular Prosthetic Limb
we’re just getting started
Attacking medical waste
$210b are wasted per year on unnecessary treatments in the us alone. time for less paranoia, and more science.
NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. The NNT for antibiotics in a case of acute bronchitis is infinity, because the medicine is no better at curing the illness than a placebo. If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5. You’re pushing 50. You’re healthy, but your doctor suggests you start taking a baby aspirin. That NNT is 2000. Not especially helpful. It’s unfortunate that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com
Gregor J. Rothfuss 