Recently heard a physician who essentially manages every case of this disease in Alberta give a really fascinating talk. The hepatic cysts these worms produce are very difficult to distinguish from cancer on imaging and the infection itself is staged using a PNM system not too dissimilar from cancer's TNM staging.
Readit Newsbakedoatmeal commented on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
No, diabetes is fundamentally a lack of ability to control your blood sugar. This means you get lots of highs but also lots of lows. It's a common misconception that diabetes just means your blood sugar is always high; rather, your sugar is high because your body no longer controls it actively.
Diabetes mellitus is an insulin problem- either a lack of insulin (Type 1) or insufficient response to insulin (Type 2). Insulin is responsible for lowering blood glucose. The hormones responsible for raising blood glucose (cortisol, IGF-1, glucagon, epinephrine) still function normally.
My understanding was hypoglycemia only occurs in diabetes in the presence of medications used to lower blood glucose (insulin formulations, sulfonylureas, etc.) and not because of diabetes itself, which when untreated invariably leads to hyperglycemia.
bakedoatmeal commented on FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor fda.gov/news-events/press... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
I recently had an unusual health event that resulted in me passing out. My wife, who is a physician, thought it might be hypoglycemia, since i'm at high risk for diabetes. She found a super friendly endocrinologist who put me on a CGM for two weeks. I never hit the hypoglycemia range during those two weeks, so it didn't really explain what my issue... but honestly the data was SUPER interesting. Just observing the various spikes made me make healthier choices, or noticing when I was feeling extra tired and seeing if that correlated to not having eaten for little while, or eating something sugary before.
It's sort of like tracking your steps when you first get a smart watch. It may not have been the reason you got the device, but seeing the data, people are encouraged to act on it, even if you don't have an acute issue. since I didn't have a prescription, I couldn't get one here (didn't want to go through some sketch online site). I tried to get one from my family in India, but the prices were really high and they couldn't get the fancier one that tracks straight to your phone, so I didn't get one.
I think this could be a god send for preventing pre-diabetic people who would take preventative steps if it weren't such a pain in the ass to measure consistently.
What is the connection between being at risk of diabetes and hypoglycemia? Wouldn’t a pre-diabetic be very protected from hypoglycemia?
A quick google shows iPhone apps detect skin cancers with up to 95% accuracy (as of 2020; may have improved a little since), I wonder what human level accuracy is (i.e. doctor carrying out a visual inspection), because surely it's not 100%? Looks like the accuracy of the FDA-cleared device is similar to the best apps (mid nineties).
It could be true that frequent inaccurate checks keeps more people alive than infrequent accurate checks. If so, an inaccurate device (or even iphone app) might be better than a doctor checking infrequently (e.g. every 2 years or so).
I don’t have the data for a cost-benefit-analysis but frequent inaccurate checks cause harm as well. The false positive rate is 3%; if all 330+ million Americans tested themselves each year, that’s millions of benign cases that will need to be followed up on which inflate costs and create backlogs.
bakedoatmeal commented on Scientists discover new antibiotics using AI euronews.com/next/2023/12... · Posted by u/taubek
A government which can't regulate effectively can't be trusted with a monopoly.
If only the world were as simple. But it isn't, and everyone knows that those with power (in general, governments) will never be regulated effectively enough for everyone - but that doesn't make them never to be trusted with monopoly, nor does it mean that the government's monopoly is bad.
Sorry, I don't really want private militaries nor private tax collection. I'm happy the government runs things like IDs and drivers licenses. In fact, various department of motor vehicles (or whatever your local thing is called) is an excellent example of how a monopoly can be a good or bad experience. I'm originally from Indiana and the motor vehicle folks are great there and the service is easy to use - by design - but it isn't like that everywhere in the US. This has nothing really to do with how "effective" their regulation is.
I'm not sure actual monopolies are better - are you really satisfied with your electricity provider or ISP?
Antibiotics harm the host as well. Giving grandma 4 antibiotics to treat a typical case of pneumonia goes against “do no harm”. Not to mention the added cost of prescribing more antibiotics.
When we can safely give multiple therapies without harming the patient, we do it. Standard HIV treatment uses 4 different drugs to raise the evolutionary hurdle for the virus.
bakedoatmeal commented on Quality of care declines after private equity takes over hospitals medicalxpress.com/news/20... · Posted by u/rntn
It’s useful to separate medicine from ER in healthcare discussions. In ER, there is no market. In healthcare, we have a deeply-flawed market. But in most zip codes, there is some competition.
The ED is the primary source of hospital admissions so I don’t think the two are that separable.
bakedoatmeal commented on Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood wired.com/story/the-psych... · Posted by u/headalgorithm
I use LSD for similar reasons.
I actually ordered a lifetime supply of acid and got into big trouble from that.
Really good stuff, makes me joyous.
How do you keep a lifetime supply of LSD? Isn't it an unstable molecule with a limited shelf life?
it's a AI summary
google eats that ad revenue
it eats the whole thing
it blocked your click on the link... it drinks your milkshake
so, yes, there a 100 billion commercially viable product
If users just look at the AI overview at the top of the search page, Google is hobbling two sources of revenue (AdSense, sponsored search results), and also disincentivizing people from sharing information on the web that makes their AI overview useful. In the process of all this they are significantly increasing the compute costs for each Google search.
This may be a necessary step to stay competitive with AI startups' search products, but I don't think this is a great selling point for AI commercialization.