There’s a lot of umbrella diagnoses that would benefit from more specific diagnostics first. What we call Alzheimer’s is probably actually caused by number of different causes depending on the person. This is true of a lot of things in medicine that get grouped together. That’s why testing a drug in mouse models with all the same characteristics sometimes works but fails to translate into humans who have more variety amongst each other.
The same is true of many diagnoses like pneumonia, cancer, alopecia, essential tremor: there’s multiple different groups that would benefit from different things, and if we had better ways to identify the groups, we’d give them what works for them instead of wasting their time with the wrong treatment. As an example, antibiotics won’t work for viral pneumonia and in addition to wasting the patient’s time, actually harm your microbiome. If you had a perfect way to know which is which, you’d always get the right treatment.
Many disease labels just mean inflammation-of-a tissue / organ.
Worth noting that some viral inflections of the respiratory tract will have a bacterial secondary, where an either commensal bacteria has over proliferated or a pathogenic bacteria has started to get a hold, and treating the bacterial secondary can help the patient better fight the viral primary.
It's quite terrible how the medical "debugging" works or rather doesn't. You run a bunch (at best) of tests then pick the most probable diagnosis and that's about it for 99.9% of cases. And then in a review you measure that the world's best performing doctor hit 45% accuracy whereas an average one hits ~33%.
As someone who has been debugging their own chronic illnesses for the past ten years (and doing better than my doctors), I wouldn’t consider the medical diagnostic process to be “debugging” at all. And that is exactly the problem. Doctors seem to be stuck thinking like bureaucrats following probabilistic flowcharts, and they’re incapable of actually thinking about a problem and debugging it.
The behavior seems to be so deeply ingrained in every single doctor I’ve seen that it seems impossible to change. I suspect they must have this drilled into them in school and residency, then it seems like every decision is constrained by insurance requirements. As far as I can tell, the situation is hopeless.
I recall a University of Washington (I think it was) where they were saying they had found Schizophrenia to be a bucket diagnosis, and had discovered that multiple sets of genes were working together in specific testable ways such that there were >4 sub types of Schizophrenia each with its own set of symptoms, and ability to respond to different medications.
The researcher did a follow-up study to confirm their thesis, but I've never seen anyone else follow up on those studies (family with Schizophrenia makes me acutely aware of developments in that field)
> read their comment as "accurately diagnose before treating"
Right. And I’m arguing that’s more of a fiction than House.
In most cases, waiting for a definitive test can be more harmful than treating when the preponderance of evidence points one way. (In some cases, the test is riskier than the treatment.)
Broadening out of medicine, it’s absolutely okay in many circumstances to try a fix before you’re sure you know what the problem is.
hs-CRP is well known as a useful biomarker and it is cheap to test too. If you look at page 13 of the GrimAge 2 paper, you'll see CRP is one of the factors most negatively correlated with their aging clock, in fact basically as strong of a negative impact as smoking. https://escholarship.org/content/qt6k46n006/qt6k46n006.pdf
This new news is about research published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
I would like to know how regular sunlight compares to the combination of vitamin D supplementation and red light therapy. If you do both of those, is that equivalent or better since it doesn't have any damaging effects of the sun?
There are other benefits as well. For example, some eye exposure to violet or ultraviolet light have been shown to reduce myopia, which might be one reason why glasses usage has increased a lot. (Screen usage is a big myopia factor as well, but it’s not the whole story.)
There are also studies suggesting that low-level UV exposure lowers risk of death by more than what can be explained by serum vitamin D levels alone, suggesting other unknown mechanisms at play.
Make sure the studies control for people bed bound for long times in the hospital or in home care, they are magnitudes more likely to die early and don't get as much sun as people doing sports etc. but the sun isn't likely to be the primary factor.
If they claim causation in the paper it is usually controlled for, if they just claim a link it might not be.
What do you think about the Nobel prize in physics going for neural networks last year? What combinations of AI + physics do you think will be most impactful and could potentially get a Nobel prize?
"Mayo’s LLM split the summaries it generated into individual facts, then matched those back to source documents. A second LLM then scored how well the facts aligned with those sources, specifically if there was a causal relationship between the two."
It doesn't sound novel from the article. I built something similar over a year ago. Here's a related example from Langchain "How to get a RAG application to add citations" https://python.langchain.com/docs/how_to/qa_citations/
I don't think you're getting it, it's not traditional RAG citations.
They are checking the _generated_ text by trying to find documents containing the facts, then rating how relevant (casually related) those facts are. This is different from looking up documents to generate an answer for a prompt. It's the reverse. Once the answer has been generated they essentially fact check it.
That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.
I made something like this to let people explore the lore of my game. It has an AI act like a dungeon master as you play through a story. You can try it for free at:
https://orbsccg.com/adventures
The main game is a strategic collectible card game, but the “adventure mode” is just for fun AI-powered stories.
I don’t know why this is downvoted. The lack of profit motive is a big reason that nutrition and supplements aren’t as well studied through rigorous trials as drug therapies. The ones that are run are funded by grants. Rather than just “more funding” I think there needs to be more systemic ways at reducing the cost of clinical trials or using alternate methods of getting high quality scientific data for answering these questions.
For example, there is a good trial running now on ketogenic diet in glioblastoma patients, NCT05708352, I think with a NIH grant and maybe the NCI as well. Here is a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W31kR0MzyRA
It still is pretty good. That and the ACM CACM are my only subscriptions. I independently purchase the Spectrum only because I don't want to be associated with IEEE anymore.
My reasons of cancellation are less fiduciary and more of a policy. In 2022, IEEE published an interview of two Russian researchers and effect of the intellectual & economic blockade in Russian academia after Ukraine invasion started. It sought pleas for donation & help. Many people pointed out it was tone deaf since the ones really suffering were the Ukrainian academics who were dislocated or persecuted in their own land. IEEE never commented or retracted those interviews & several people canceled their membership in disgust.
I subscribe to Spectrum for about $50 through Omeda rather than continue giving IEEE additional membership fee. I know some part will be shared with IEEE, but I am minimizing this by conscious choice.
> several people canceled their membership in disgust
Looks like nothing of value was lost.
Ukraine already gets 99.99% of airtime. Two Russian researchers -- not army generals or politicians, mind you -- were given a chance to describe the problems the conflict has created for their side, and we're supposed to pretend that those problems do not exist and their struggle doesn't matter because somebody else has it worse.
There's this thing called "journalism" where you're supposed to be given raw facts from all sides with as little interpretation (i.e. propaganda) as possible, and think for yourself. It used to be more common back in the day, though maybe not much. Now we only want to hear things that closely follow our own narrative, and ignore everything else. It's easier to live this way, I understand.
The same is true of many diagnoses like pneumonia, cancer, alopecia, essential tremor: there’s multiple different groups that would benefit from different things, and if we had better ways to identify the groups, we’d give them what works for them instead of wasting their time with the wrong treatment. As an example, antibiotics won’t work for viral pneumonia and in addition to wasting the patient’s time, actually harm your microbiome. If you had a perfect way to know which is which, you’d always get the right treatment.
Precision medicine takes this even further.
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