Tag: medicine

Soft exoskeletons

I wonder whether the space or disability applications will come on line first.

2013-05-24: Warrior Web

The Army is nearing completion of a five-month series of tests to evaluate multiple Warrior Web prototype devices. The testing evaluates how each prototype incorporates different technologies and approaches to reduce forces on the body, decrease fatigue, stabilize joints and help Soldiers to maintain a natural gait under a heavy load. The testing uses a multi-camera motion-capture system to determine any changes in gait or balance, a cardio-pulmonary exercise testing device to measure oxygen consumption and a variety of sensors to collect force, acceleration and muscle activity data.

2015-07-20: Harvard Soft Exosuits

compared to a traditional exoskeleton, these systems have several advantages, the wearer’s joints are unconstrained by external rigid structures, and the worn part of the suit is extremely light.

2016-09-25: Exoskeleton to get average soldiers to run 24km/h

2018-07-06: Powered Clothing

Seismic is combining clothing and robotics into what they call Powered Clothing. They aim to get exosuits into stores by the end of 2018 in the US, Japan and the UK. The suit’s ‘electric muscles’, powered by tiny motors, contract and mimic human muscle. These electric muscles are part of the clothing around the joints of the body and attached via grips in the clothing. The grips act like tendons in the human body. A computer and sensors tracking body movements are also integrated into the suit; software tells the muscles in the clothing when to activate. The hard technology components such as motors, batteries and control boards are incorporated into hexagonal low-profile pods, designed for maximum comfort.

The walk to subsume all

lots of “walk for the cure” today: breast cancer, alzheimers, ms. the breast cancer one had inappropriate cow mascots (!?!). this got me wondering, maybe we should organize a walk for the cure (of death). it would, by definition, subsume all the other ones.

FDA nonsense

FDA commissioner Alexander M. Schmidt

In all of FDA’s history, I am unable to find a single instance where a congressional committee investigated the failure of FDA to approve a new drug. But, the times when hearings have been held to criticize our approval of new drugs have been so frequent that we aren’t able to count them. … The message to FDA staff could not be clearer.

2013-11-26: as usual, the FDA is up to no good.

At the same time that the NSA is secretly and illegally obtaining information about Americans the FDA is making it illegal for Americans to obtain information about themselves.

2014-08-05: the FDA could help by eliminating its onerous rules for diseases with 60% mortality rates. Won’t happen of course, it’s easier to bury lots of innocents than to overcome cover-your-ass (pretty much the reason for the FDA to exist). Or as the onion put it, the Ebola Vaccine is at least 50 white people away.
2016-07-15: Fluoride still not available

American dentists first started using similar silver-based treatments in the early 1900s. The FDA is literally over 100 years behind the times.It seems that the future of dental treatment has been here all along but a combination of dentists wanting to be surgeons, lost knowledge, and FDA cost and delay prevented it from being distributed

Silver diamine fluoride been used for decades in Japan, but it’s been available in the United States, under the brand name Advantage Arrest, for just ~1 year. Toddlers in low-income families sometimes have to wait 1 year for fillings in an operating room. Transporting and treating frail patients, assuming they can afford to see a dentist, can be difficult. But now some patients can be quickly treated where they live.
2020-04-17: Nutrition overregulation

1 reason why food intended for restaurants is not reallocated to supermarkets: Nutrition labeling also frequently doesn’t comply with Agriculture Department and FDA guidelines for consumer sales

2020-12-05: This is nonsense. “Delay to allay” won’t convince anyone, and meanwhile people are dying.

Dr. Fauci said the politicization of the pandemic in his own country had led regulators to move a little more cautiously than the British, to avoid losing public support. There is no plausible reason why this basic analysis cannot be done in 24 hours. The FDA and external scientists have a simple task: confirm or reject the review already conducted by the trial’s independent data safety monitoring board before FDA submission.

2021-02-07: The FDA is unable to make sense.

Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce 1 or 2 people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of $ and the careers of 1000s of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.

2021-02-15: Why isn’t there a reciprocal approval with the EU?

I’ve long argued that if a drug or medical device is approved in another country with a Stringent Regulatory Authority it ought to be approved in the United States. But, of course, the argument is even stronger in the other direction. Drugs and devices approved in the United States ought to be approved elsewhere. Indeed, this is how much of the world actually works because most countries do not have capability to evaluate drugs and devices the way the FDA or the EMA does. Although it’s the way the world works, few will admit it because that would violate pretensions of regulatory nationalism. Moreover, keeping up with pretenses means transaction costs and unnecessary delays. Regulatory nationalism has added months to vaccine delivery and now threatens to put to waste millions of stockpiled doses.

2021-03-02: millions of people die of heart disease every year. there has been no progress in artificial hearts in 50 years due to.. wait for it.. FDA:

The FDA gave Abiomed permission to implant 60 more devices, but it was clear that the heart would need to be updated, and then approved all over again—a lengthy process for which no one had the fortitude. “Abiomed threw in the towel. They were, like, ‘This is too hard!’ ”

2021-03-16: What are FDA inspectors even doing?

Grocery store workers are working, meat packers are working, hell bars and restaurants are open in many parts of the country but FDA inspectors aren’t inspecting. It boggles the mind.

Let’s review. The FDA prevented private firms from offering SARS-Cov2 tests in the crucial early weeks of the pandemic, delayed the approval of vaccines, took weeks to arrange meetings to approve vaccines even as 1000s died daily, failed to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine, failed to quickly approve rapid antigen tests, and failed to perform inspections necessary to keep pharmaceutical supply lines open.

2021-04-14: the FDA is completely insane and is halting the distribution for the J&J vaccine due to very rare side effects. as before, there’s no consequences for acts of omission vs acts of commission. they’re much more worried about their “reputation” than actually saving lives, just like ethicists have been in this crisis. a disgrace.

As the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pauses in the United States, Philip Bump for The Washington Post offers a quick visualization that shows 100 vaccinations per second. A red one appears if there’s a side effect. But because the side effect is rare, currently at 1 in 1.1M, the red dot on the visualization likely never appears as you watch. The blue dots are potential lives saved if the J&J vaccine continues.

Brain Preservation

The Brain Preservation Foundation announces a prize for the first team to demonstrate a technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable.

2012-12-07: Eternal Brain. This is fascinating. It doesn’t really matter that much whether we’ll be able to reconstruct a brain from a 3D scan, brain plastination seems a much more appealing memento mori than the alternatives. Would I want my dear friends in the ground vs a urn vs a pretty paper weight? Definitely the paper weight.

2013-08-02: The real postmortem.

In the near future, a neurologist and 2 homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments.

2014-10-09: Brain death after heart death

The largest scientific study of “life after death” and near death experiences in cardiac arrest patients (who were resuscitated) suggests that some people may sustain several minutes of awareness after the heart stops. Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to 3 minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”

2020-01-07: 2.5 ka brain scans

It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many 1000s of years ago could persist just in wet ground. the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high fat content. Axel Petzold had spent years researching 2 types of filaments in the brain – neurofilaments and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) – which act like scaffolds to hold brain matter together. He found both of these were still present in the Heslington brain, suggesting they played a key role in keeping the brain matter together

Precision Medicine

A working model of your body, grounded in your own genome, refreshed continually with measurements from your body’s insides. This information will be collated with readings from millions of other monitored bodies. Software will produce detailed guidance about diet, supplements, exercise, medication, or treatment—guidance based not on the current practice of lumping symptoms together into broad categories of disorders, but on a precise reading of your own body’s peculiarities and its status in real time.

“And at that point you now have, for the first time in history, a scientific basis for medicine.”

turning medicine from craft into science.
2019-02-01:

However, nearly 20 years after the first predictions of dramatic success, we find no impact of the human genome project on the population’s life expectancy or any other public health measure, notwithstanding the vast resources that have been directed at genomics. Exaggerated expectations of how large an impact on disease would be found for genes have been paralleled by unrealistic timelines for success, yet the promotion of precision medicine continues unabated.

The authors of this new paper end by saying that “it is urgent that the biomedical research community reconsider its ongoing obsession with the human genome“, which is strong language. We’ve learned a lot from genomic studies, and we’re still learning more, and it’s not going away. But if by “obsession” they mean trying to apply genomic viewpoints to every problem regardless of suitability, or promising success in some of these programs once we can do just a bit more sequencing – because that’s all they’re lacking – then they have a point. The genome is great, the genome is huge, the genome is important. But it’s not the only great huge important thing out there.

Spinal Cord Regeneration

This is quite possibly world-changing technology.

Tesearchers found that the newly formed fibers bypassed the original spinal lesion and allowed signals from the brain to reach the electrochemically awakened spine. And the signal was sufficiently strong to initiate movement over ground — without the treadmill — meaning the rats began to walk voluntarily towards the reward, entirely supporting their own weight with their hind legs. A severed section of the spinal cord can make a comeback when its own innate intelligence and regenerative capacity is awakened. The study points to a profound change in our understanding of the central nervous system. It is yet unclear if similar rehabilitation techniques could work for humans, but the observed nerve growth hints at new methods for treating paralysis.

2015-09-13:

A 28-year-old who has been paralyzed for more than a decade as a result of a spinal cord injury has become the first person to be able to “feel” physical sensations through a prosthetic hand directly connected to his brain, and even identify which mechanical finger is being gently touched.

2016-04-18:

the first neural bypass for spinal cord injuries that reconnects the brain to muscles, allowing voluntary and functional control of a paralyzed limb by using a patient’s thoughts — no robotic prosthetic arm required.

2016-11-11:

An international team of scientists has used a wireless “brain-spinal interface” to bypass spinal cord injuries in a pair of rhesus macaques, restoring nearly normal intentional walking movement to a temporarily paralyzed leg.

The finding could help in developing a similar system to rehabilitate humans who have had spinal cord injuries.


2018-09-25:

Thomas and Jeff Marquis, who was paralyzed after a mountain biking accident, can now independently walk again after participating in a study at the University of Louisville that was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Thomas’ balance is still off and she needs a walker, but she can walk 100m across grass. She also gained muscle and lost the nerve pain in her foot that has persisted since her accident. Another unnamed person with a spinal cord injury can now independently step across the ground with help from a trainer.

2021-01-30:

After 4 months of training—including 2 with stimulation—every person more than doubled their pinching strength. Several doubled their grasping strength. 1 person regained enough dexterity to drive without an assistive device. Another could handle their catheter well enough to insert it on their own. Owen decided to try painting. At the beginning of the experiment, she recalls, “I was like, ‘I can kind of hold a brush and some paints, and why don’t I give this a go?’” So she ordered a paint-by-numbers kit of a portrait of a dog. “It was kind of hard, and I don’t think it turned out very well, but I’m still really impressed by it”.

2022-02-08:

3 people once paralyzed by complete spinal-cord injuries can walk, swim, work the pedals of a bicycle and even paddle canoes, thanks to an implant specifically designed to control movement by mimicking the signals the lower body usually receives from the brain and upper spinal cord. Once the implant was in place, each person could control the pattern of electrical stimulation, using buttons and a tablet to raise or lower each leg, for example. All 3 participants recovered some level of movement within 1 day of activating the implant, including being able to walk on a treadmill while their weight was supported. “The first few steps were incredible — a dream come true!”. The participants were also able to take part in activities such as pedalling a bicycle and performing squats, and to keep their bodies stable while paddling canoes, using the device to guide their muscles through preprogrammed movements.

Have you considered being a vegetarian?

If you’re still eating chicken, you’re not reading the news.
Factory farming is nasty business, I tell you. A sudden rash of reports is beginning to reveal the horrible reality of industrial chicken farming.

“Poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic. It’s unbelievable what we found.”

Why caffeine? It turns out that chickens are fed coffee pulp to keep them awake all night so they keep eating and become fatter.

A previous study found that 90% of chickens raised for meat were fed arsenic.

Most chicken farmers don’t even know what they’re feeding the chickens, as the pre-packaged feed ingredients are a trade secret.

Obama’s USDA, meanwhile, is springing into action. The department wants to stop inspecting poultry plants and allow employees of the plant do the inspections. That would enable factory food assembly lines to process 200 chickens per minute, rather than the 140 per minute currently possible.

A pilot program for the plant employee inspections found that they “were missing defective poultry at high rates.”

“The inspectors had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands.”