Medical updates

• Remember when I was in that Supernova clinical trial to help make the next generation of monoclonal Covid antibodies? It sounded good at first, but now this article in The Lancet suggests it’s going to fail just the same way as the previous generation failed: the virus is mutating faster than we can make antibodies. 
• Gary is not allergic to any of the common food allergens. The doctor came out and got me to confirm there were no reactions. He insisted the doctor was wrong even as she said, “You aren't listening to me.” I realized she brought me in thinking he might listen to me, and, no. Eventually, he apologized, listened to her, and we have now decided that 1) she might be right and 2) in the last two months his rash has improved by 50%, and that’s good news and 3) Chrohn’s disease shall be the preferred diafauxsis going forward.
• My repeat liver blood tests showed that the bad liver numbers have mostly trended toward the good after we shut off the statin. The new liver test shows that a GGT number is bad, but who knows what it was before? It all seems positive. Even ChatGPT remained calm.

Comments

[KC]

Sigh, sigh-yay, and yay-with-a-smidge-of-sigh.

It's good to have at least partial medical positives, though!!! (did the doctor suggest Crohn's, or is that all Gary+Google? at any rate it's at least unlikely to do much harm)

[theQueen]

KC - Actually a friend at work suggested Crohn's, and it does make some sense given some of his more delicate symptoms. Rash, fevers, delicate symptoms, and improvement when fasting.

[KC]

Oh GOOD. I hope treatment for it can help things out.

(and if he wants to try the Hot New Thing that is *probably* just a high-quality placebo for at least half the things it's being suggested for right now, he can probably try tVNS on his own if he wants to: https://bioelecmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42234-023-00129-y [note that left side instead of right side vagus nerve is important since the right side has some heart involvement whereas left side has had zero negative effects for anyone as far as I'm aware])(It does have physiological effects! and it may trick the body into thinking stress is lower than it is and thus it *might* actually be having as wide of a wow-that's-a-lot-of-things effect as is coming up in initial studies, but also maybe not. but also it's pretty harmless per side effect/negative outcome reports, so there's that.)

[theQueen]

KC - If only I could get past the author’s name. Bruno. Not Dr. Bruno? If I saw a “Dr.” at the front or an “M.D.” at the end I could get behind it.

[theQueen]

KC - of course now I check my Lancet article and no one there is a doctor. Hmpfh.

[KC]

... it is more likely that at least the lead authors of any given medical journal article are all doctors [with maybe some student researchers in the mix]; a lot of journal articles make you click through for the affiliations and no one gets titles at all. Summaries are sometimes by only one person and may be by a grad student [but rarely]; Bruno is, when he is being talked about, a professor of gastroenterology in France, apparently. (I was looking for most-recent readable article on tVNS and Crohn's, since that'll usually have citations of all the other studies that have been done, or at least most of them, along with summaries.)

This is one of the more recent studies with tVNS and POTS: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37999672/ (summary: it reduced heart rate, and reduced some autoimmune markers but did not have much of a symptom correlation WHY? we thought this all tied together???) There's also stuff on treatment-resistant depression and, of course, epilepsy (I think the way it worked is that VNS started with treating epilepsy and then when people with epilepsy got better from other intractable things after getting the VNS implanted, they went "... huh" and did studies on those other intractable things on people without epilepsy? and now there is tVNS so you do not have to get surgery but it is probably at least somewhat less effective? but tVNS is probably still in the Optimistic Phase and is very definitely *not* anywhere near the "we definitely know why this works" phase yet.)

[theQueen]

KC - They don't know how anti-depressants work either. (Serotonin is evidently not the answer.) Seems like simulating a nerve would be a good thing, through, like a tickle of your brain.

[KC]

Here's an NPR article re: autoimmune diseases in general: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5272748/vagus-nerve-stimulation-may-tame-autoimmune-diseases

I mean, it would be either good or bad, right, stimulating something random? But maybe it is good, or at least good for specific things...

... wait. Doesn't Gary have epilepsy? I feel like epilepsy meds have previously been mentioned... I wonder if he could be tried on this for epilepsy and see if it positively affects The Rash as well? (although: also: if he has things that currently WORK I totally understand not wanting to change them.)

[theQueen]

KC - oh there are all kinds of harsh treatments for epilepsy. Before our first date he asked what I learned in biology class and I told him about a surgery for people with epilepsy where they separate the two halves of the brain at the midpoint. I didn't know he had epilepsy.

[KC]

YEP there are some downright terrifying ones for epilepsy.

(having done tVNS-ish, I would classify it as Really Not Harsh, however; the bit of ear you pinch the electrodes over gets kind of annoyed about being pinched/zapped, but not overly so, and there were zero side effects [and my body usually does side effects with a vengeance]. I was thinking that he could potentially get medically-prescribed access with epilepsy and thereby see if it helped out Crohn's/rash as well, but no, the FDA has not yet approved any of the devices quite yet, phooey.)(and odds seem low that there would be a research study looking for participants in your specific area)

(I have the "regular ol' TENS machine set to the clinical wavelength but not perfectly matching the POTS study's wave*form*" cheapo see-if-$40-does-anything-before-spending-700-euros option; also the European manufacturers of the device with the wave*form*, used in various studies, won't ship to the US due to FDA/import issues, although Canada can get them just fine.)

[theQueen]

KC - That seems wrong. Why do Canadians get the good healthcare - oh, wait, that’s right, they’re civilized.

[KC]

In general I agree re: the healthcare, but this specific bit is just that the FDA is taking a while to be convinced that this gizmo works, and won't allow it to be sold with claims of working before they are convinced it works, which is annoying in this specific instance but has been useful in the past - sometimes regulatory bodies do let things through too fast, sometimes they're unnecessarily slow, but it's legitimately hard to suss out (esp. in any cases where the studies have been funded by the company selling the gizmo, which, like, look it is right to be a bit suspicious!).

But also yes, Canada gets better health care because of civilization, in general; may their civilization continue to increase, and may ours eventually catch up...

[theQueen]

KC - it does seem that if it truly solves all these diseases it would be like the polio and covid vaccines: it would be made free to the world.

[KC]

It'll be interesting in a few years to see whether there are comparative clinical efficacy trials between Cheap Option and Proprietary Option. With POTS, the treatment as applied so far only mitigates a few of the symptoms; it doesn't solve it, but it improves things to a degree comparable to some medications. I don't know what its... solution percentage?... is for other things; treatment-resistant depression, for instance. Like, look, if we can turn that Bad Brain Noise down by even 10% it's worth quite a lot, but it would still be substantially different from a cure.

Well. Also. We can't even get mosquito nets and oral rehydration salts to everyone and those are 1. cheap and 2. lifesaving.

But yeah, zapping nerves [vagus nerve in this case; trigeminal nerve re: migraines] with electric pulses is looking promising; but figuring out what the ideal settings are for each ailment zapping does affect will probably take a while. But it would be cool if The Rich Ones did make it widely available after those answers were found!!!

[theQueen]

KC - I hate to sympathize with the rich, but maybe they would prefer to buy things that are not cheap and lifesaving. There wouldn’t be any attention given to buying the cheap and lifesaving stuff. Imagine if Mark Z. said, “I am going to bankroll the Meals on Wheels program.” People would yawn, “Canned peas and fish sticks and white bread for the elderly? You’d think he could do better.”

[KC]

... I would think much better of billionaires if they gave money to 1. maintenance [instead of giving the Thing and then letting the maintenance/repair/upkeep costs fall on the recipient... which costs in a year are often greater than the initial costs, leading the Thing to end up being unused because they can't afford to repair it] and 2. un-flashy programs. But that's me.

[theQueen]

KC - That is a good point . Like the people winning sportscars in game shows and they can’t afford the gas and insurance.

[KC]

Or they have to pay the *tax* for the big thing they won and they... can't. And a new car isn't worth what a new car "costs" anyway so it's not like you can just sell the car to get the full value of it, either.

The sheer idiocy of not paying for the maintenance of Good Things just gets my goat. Like, if it was ever a worthwhile project, keep it *alive* don't just pay huge buckets of money to start it and then put the whole thing in the scrap heap a year (or, in the case of the school Zuckerberg founded, 10 years) later. (esp. for things where yes, it's good but *also* it required teachers to learn a whole new system, or it replaces something that was permanent but not quite as great and then this smart white board or whatever dies and... uh. Need to buy new regular whiteboards again...)

Obviously some ideas won't work out in practice and then you want to stop funding them, but equally obviously if billiionaires give technology out to schools, etc. *this* many times then either 1. it's worth having and therefore worth maintaining or 2. it's not worth maintaining and *therefore it is not worth doing all these technology dumps in the first place* esp. since those technology dumps usually require a bunch of already-overloaded people to learn new systems and teach the new systems to kids (and then re-learn how they did things before when the systems go kaput).

It costs more to keep restarting than to start once, well, thinking about and planning the project to keep maintenance feasible/cheap, and then maintain. But noooo we need to give big flashy new stuff.

[TheQueen]

KC - When did whiteboards show up? I was a blackboard / greenboard baby.

[KC]

Not sure, honestly. My university had both, with some lecture halls having a couple of each. Newer classrooms had more/only whiteboards, although a few of them had a hidden blackboard you could slide the whiteboard aside to expose.

It's possible the smartboards replaced the old green blackboards in k-12 schools rather than replacing whiteboards...