Tag: medicine

Doctor delusions

Your patients’ last doctor was worse than you. Your patients love you Patients often come to you, but never leave you You’ve probably successfully treated most of your patients You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know Your victories belong to you, your failures belong to Nature You do a good job satisfying your own values

Multiplex editing

Enhancing Organs for Cryonics, Space and Transplants

They are able to multiplex edit on the repeating gene sequences. The repeating gene sequences are key to many aspects of antiaging and cancer and other diseases. They are working to multiplex editing for enhancing organs. The can make the organs more resistant to cryopreservation and disease immunity. They can make people better able to travel in space and be more radiation resistant

Health Data Scale

Fitbit has 150B hours of anonymized health data

Fitbit’s data confirms a lot of what cardiologists already know. But because the Fitbit data set is ridiculously huge, it unearthed some surprises, too. … The first observation from Fitbit’s data: Women tend to have higher resting heart rates than men.

1918 Flu

The Spanish flu strain killed its victims with a swiftness never seen before. In the United States stories abounded of people waking up sick and dying on their way to work. The symptoms were gruesome: Sufferers would develop a fever and become short of breath. Lack of oxygen meant their faces appeared tinged with blue. Hemorrhages filled the lungs with blood and caused catastrophic vomiting and nosebleeds, with victims drowning in their own fluids. Unlike so many strains of influenza before it, Spanish flu attacked not only the very young and the very old, but also healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40.

2020-03-01:

In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves.

Medicine Cost Disease

Cheap-O Psychiatry wouldn’t have an office, because offices cost money. You would Skype, from your house to mine. It wouldn’t have a receptionist, because receptionists cost money. You would book a slot in my Google Calendar. It wouldn’t have a billing department, because billing departments cost money. You would PayPal me the cost of the appointment afterwards. How little could Cheap-O charge? Suppose I wanted to earn an average psychiatrist salary of about $200K – the whole point of cost disease is that we should be able to lower prices without anyone having to take a pay cut. And suppose I work a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, each appointment takes 15 minutes, and 75% of my workday is patient appointments. That’s 6000 appointments per year. So to make my $200K I would need to charge about $35 per appointment. There would be a few added costs – malpractice insurance would probably run about $10K per year – but this is the best-case scenario.

$35 per appointment isn’t bad. Most existing cash-only psychiatry practices charge at least $150 per (30 minute) appointment, so we would be less than a quarter of the going rate. I think a lot of insurances charge a $40 copay per psychiatrist visit, so even uninsured Cheap-O patients would be paying less cash than insured patients anywhere else. Create Cheap-O style psychiatry offices, primary care offices, etc, all around the country, and maybe (aside from catastrophe insurance, which should be cheap) having health insurance would no longer be such a big deal.

When the Next Plague Hits

Despite advances in antibiotics and vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo sapiens is still locked in the same epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we’ve been fighting since the beginning of our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the unprecedented scale of the conflict. Down through the centuries, diseases have always excelled at exploiting flux.

IBS Belt

Marshall now thinks he’s found a way to diagnose I.B.S. quickly and directly: by listening to it. Marshall described a device that he and colleagues are developing: a wide belt, to be worn by the patient, that records the creaks and undulations of the gut, analyzes them with software, and recognizes the distinct sonic signature of I.B.S.

Soil Microbiome

Bruns is using high-throughput sequencing, among other tools, to tease apart this “DNA soup” that is contained within soil. Her research on nitrogen-cycling microbes at the field scale fits into the bigger picture of reducing nutrient transport to coastal dead zones. “Overall, 50% of the nitrogen in fertilizer that’s applied to crops is not taken up by the crops. Instead it leaches to the groundwater or runs off in sediment. Much of that nitrogen eventually makes its way into the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay, where it upsets ecosystems. I’m interested in how we can stop this process at the source, how we can make our nitrogen application and management methods less wasteful.”