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0 pointsbryanrasmussen11mo ago0 comments

>Depends very much on the disease, for my specific type of brain fog from dysautonomia (via ME/CFS and hEDS)

sorry, I thought we were talking about Alzheimer's because Alzheimer's was what was mentioned in the post I responded to but now I see it is in fact every ailment that affects the brain, and not just Alzheimer's.

>It’s also likely that even if the degradation is permanent it is also likely multifaceted and one of those facets is likely to be treatable such that the impact of the degradation could be greatly reduced.

this might be what was meant here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44277444 - when I said that the brain has a lot of redundancies and of course caught and stopped early enough then it wouldn't be such a big problem

but hey, what do I know, I didn't even know what we were talking about evidently, thanks for correcting me.

>It’s a ridiculous conflation to suggest that the inability to take a regular person and give them Von Neumann intelligence means that we can’t help Von Neumann stuffing an ailment even if a component of that ailment is clearly permanent.

OK well I guess I am taking a more stringent meaning of cure than you are, you are taking the relieve meaning, which is of course to help, but I am taking the revert meaning. I believe mine is a pretty common meaning, at least in the vernacular. I mean when they say we cure cancer they don't mean it will make the pain less intense and maybe you can live twice as long as otherwise.

Certainly I believe the pains and problems of a disease can be relieved, but in the case of Alzheimer's (sorry for going back to the disease I was discussing since you have informed me I was not discussing that but since I was, actually, discussing that I am just going to have to stick with it) it can not necessarily be reverted - it can potentially be reverted as I indicated earlier if not too much damage is done (because of redundancies), but if for example you have late stage Alzheimer's I don't believe you are going to get to cure (revert) all damages.

In such cases you can manage to stop it and rehabilitate the patient to a less damaged earlier state perhaps, but otherwise I would think there was too much damage to revert it, because if brain tissue is too damaged I suppose (perhaps again due to a naive model of how I suppose memories and knowledge are maintained in the brain) that the data that was held by these damaged sections is now unrecoverable.

on edit: removed some verbiage.

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cjbgkagh11mo ago

That's part of the problem, the binary classification of diseased state. This is a cultural legacy from the Germ theory vs Terrain theory and the fact that the Allies won WWII - the Germans and Japanese were big on Terrain theory. The idea of Germ theory is that the body is fine unless there is a germ and thus the cure is to remove the germ. In your example replace germ with cancer. There was also a time where it was the empiricists versus fundamentalists but academia pushed medicine into a predominately fundamentalist approach not because it's more predictive but because it's easier to defend academically. Now that we have advanced data science tools we can do empirical studies at massive scale on already collected datasets, the results of this appear when google search gives useful health results, and now with LLMs giving very helpful information. The LLM, unlike a doctor, is not trying to relate everything to the Krebs cycle because they spent so long memorizing it.

You're hung up on the binary cure or not cure. It would be like doing a machine learning problem with a binary loss function, might as well try to make it better and you'll learn things on the way that could lead to a cure i.e. you'll have a smoother gradient that'll make advancements easier.

Most doctors know next to nothing about ME/CFS and I suspect they know a similar next to nothing about Alzheimer's so when they say there are no treatments I don't believe them. It's a dysfunctional industry backed by a dysfunctional academic system combined with a dysfunctional political system. If you do the similar research that I did on ME/CFS you'll find that many of the same rules apply to Alzheimers which suggest to me that it's likely auto-immune related, I don't need to know the actual mechanism for it for me to see that empirically it presents in a way that looks like auto-immune. Then empirically it appears that GLP-1As are really good for auto-immune so transitively I highly suspect GLP-1As will helpful here and in-fact the FDA has approved a GLP-1A for the treatment of Alzheimer's so I'm not the only one who thinks this.

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cjbgkagh11mo ago

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